Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about the EA loot box controversy with the recent release of Star Wars Battlefront II. It's gotten so much negative exposure, the EU government were investigating whether or not loot boxes constitute as gambling. (they eventually did) The state of Hawaii also had a word or two on the issue as well. “This game is a Star Wars-themed online casino, designed to lure kids into spending money, ” state of Hawaii’s Representative Chris Lee said. “It’s a trap.” Where did all of this originate from? Reddit, of course.

It all started with Reddit user MBMMaverick and his post complaining how absurd it is to pay $80 for the game, but having characters like Darth Vader locked. The choice to play central Star War characters isn’t available right after purchase. You either pay real money, or, according to another Reddit user, spend 40+ hours just to unlock one character. It's your typical complaint thread (albeit a very reasonable complaint), until he received a developer response:

The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets. Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

This lit the Reddit world on fire. It caused a major snowball effect. The backlash was so hard, it resulted more than 674,000 downvotes as of November 25th. The most downvoted post in Reddit. Ever. Of course EA would be the company to raise, or in their case, lower the bar when it comes to customer relations. This PR disaster also resulted with EA "temporarily" removing microtransactions only hours after the game’s release. This was thier immediate response:

Thank you to everyone in our community for being the passionate fans that you are.

Our goal has always been to create the best possible game for all of you – devoted Star Wars fans and game players alike. We’ve also had an ongoing commitment to constantly listen, tune and evolve the experience as it grows. You’ve seen this with both the major adjustments, and polish, we have made over the past several weeks.

But as we approach the worldwide launch, it's clear that many of you feel there are still challenges in the design. We’ve heard the concerns about potentially giving players unfair advantages. And we’ve heard that this is overshadowing an otherwise great game. This was never our intention. Sorry we didn’t get this right.

We hear you loud and clear, so we’re turning off all in-game purchases. We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we’ve made changes to the game. We’ll share more details as we work through this.

We have created a game that is built on your input, and it will continue to evolve and grow. Star Wars Battlefront II is three times the size of the previous game, bringing to life a brand new Star Wars story, space battles, epic new multiplayer experiences across all three Star Wars eras, with more free content to come. We want you to enjoy it, so please keep your thoughts coming. And we will keep you updated on our progress.

Unfortunately, the damage has been done. EA stocks dropped sharply, and investors are concerned about future sales. This even resulted in adjusting how progression works in thier other games. Hopefully this will shake up the gaming industry and realize that gamers won’t stand for being constantly nickled and dimed on AAA releases. Microtransactions has been a crux in the gaming world for some time now, and it’s getting out of hand. What once used to a be lucrative business model for free-to-play games has now slithered it’s way to AAA full priced games. You know something is wrong when you pay $60 for a title just to be riddled with day-one patches, microtransactions, ‘season passes’, and (to an extent) DLCs. I would love to go back to the days where you paid money for a full game. Secrets, extra characters or levels were available by actually playing the game...or cheat codes. I understand making games is more expensive than ever, but there’s other ways to make money back outside of initial sales. Hopefully this is a huge slice of humble pie that EA will swallow.