Analyst Cuts EA Profit Estimate Due To Poor Star Wars Battlefront 2 Sales

Slowly but surely the hopes of Star Wars fans are dying as little clues continue to drop that spell out the demise of the highly anticipated sequel game Star Wars Battlefront 2. The most recent tragedy to befall the game is the cutting of EA's profit estimates by an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The price target and profit estimate for EA following poor sales of Star Wars Battlefront 2 is not a good sign for those hardcore fans who have stuck with the game through all the backlash and bad press. After already having their loyalty tested by the hideous progression system and lack of game modes, fans are now faced with a tough reality, EA may cut support for Battlefront 2 altogether.

After the game faced severe and even record-breaking backlash (a Reddit comment from EA became the most downvoted post in the site's history) over an exploitative loot crate system that is nearly identical to gambling machines at Casinos, EA decided to remove microtransactions from the game completely.

Not only were the loot crates introduced in such a way as to take advantage of people with deep pockets and addictive personalities, but the items themselves gained from the crates gave players with the most money the greater advantage. One Reddit user even came up with a figure of roughly $2,100 to unlock everything in the game, or 4,000 hours of gameplay.

Blake Jorgensen is the CFO of EA and he said in a recent interview with Glixel, "Clearly we are very focused on listening to the consumer and understanding what the consumer wants and that’s evolving constantly. But we’re working on improving the progression system. We turned the MTX [microtransactions] off as an opportunity to work on the progression system inside the game. We’re continuing to do that. I think there’s an update this week and again next week."

Jorgensen hinted at bringing back the microtransactions at a later date, "Over time, we’ll address how we will want to bring the MTX either into the game or not and what form we will decide to bring it into."

NPD sales data revealed that Battlefront 2's figures for November were down 52% compared to the first Battlefront. Reddit users pointed the lack of sales and photographed shelves that had been stripped of everything except Star Wars Battlefront 2.

<img src="https://media.8ch.net/file_store/67e0fbe1cb94acbcbf7372c944e4e8fde584a0a5ea2202bdbd08e7420c39bee7.jpg" style="max-height:640px;max-width:360px;">

<span style="margin-top:15px;rgba(42,51,6,0.7);font-size:12px;">Credit: oarCowb3ll | Reddit</span>

However, these are not the only signs of an early demise, the game promised special community events such as 'Blast Sunday' but instead of delivering any kind of challenge, reward or anything whatsoever that would excite players, the game offered a playlist that was restricted to only post Force Awakens maps.

Basically, they put a button in the game that was a way for people to only play maps from a specific era which should already be a part of the base game. Being able to choose a specific map to play on is pretty much standard, even the first Battlefront had the ability to manually select the map you wanted to play.

The "Blast Sunday" event was a grim foreshadowing of whats to come, a future with very little support, almost no effort to engage the community, and many game-breaking bugs still rampant in the online modes.

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Source: https://www.vg247.com/2017/12/13/star-wars-battlefront-2-sales-estimates-reduced/