If you've missed all of the headlines these past few days, folks aren't too happy with EA's handling of Star Wars Battlefront II. They've made their frustrations known on forums, through review sites and, most recently, through a petition to pull the Star Wars license from the publisher.
If you head on over to Change.org, you'll discover a petition is circulating called "Lucasfilm: Revoke EA's Star Wars License." As of this writing, the petition has gained 4,345 virtual signatures. According to the petition summary, those were gained over the course of about three days.
While not the most eloquently worded argument, the petition hits on several key points as being cause for concern when it comes to EA's handling of the Star Wars license.
EA have had the Star Wars video game license for the last 4 years, and in that time the company's proven to their consumers that they honestly don't care about the gameplay experience or content, they'd rather rush out a game that will try and milk as much money out of consumers as possible.
The petition begins its deconstruction of EA with the 2015 launch of Star Wars Battlefront, a game that many pinged for being light on content.
From there, the petition discusses the Visceral Star Wars game helmed by Amy Hennig. By all accounts, that game was set to be focused on a single-player campaign set in the galaxy far, far away. Given Hennig's history at Naughty Dog, it's safe to say fans were expecting Uncharted, but set in the Star Wars universe. In recent weeks we learned that the project was going to "pivot" to the "games as service" model and that the studio itself was being closed. The petition argues that this is another example of EA choosing to forfeit story for a model geared toward earning continuing revenue from players.
The argument is capped off with Star Wars Battlefront II, which offers a lot more content compared to its predecessor, but at the cost of microtransaction practices that have been called into question many, many times these past few weeks. There's no point in rehashing all of that here, as you can't throw a rock in the games reporting space these days without hitting seven thinkpieces on the matter. (Not saying that's bad, just that it's a hot topic that has been very thoroughly explained at this point.)
Things aren't looking too good for EA or DICE following the launch of Battlefront II. EA's response to fan backlash became the most down-voted item in Reddit history and the game is being review bombed on all fronts.
We're not sure if 5,000 signatures is enough to get the attention of Lucasfilm, but we'll be interested in seeing how this all plays out.
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