EA is no stranger to pissing off players, but amassing the most down-voted comment in Reddit history forced even them to take note. Following the wave of negative backlash heaped upon them, EA responded in an open letter to the community where they immediately reduced the amount to unlock heroes by 75%. On the outside, and as a PR issue, this seems to support what EA says in their letter, that they are listening to the community, but they aren’t, not by a long shot.

There are a lot of things EA could have done to staunch the bleeding PR caused by Star Wars Battlefront 2, but what they did do was an underhanded move. They lowered the cost of heroes while simultaneously lowering the credits earned for completing the game. Whether or not their intention was for rewarded credits to be enough to buy Iden – as their Twitter comment states – it defeats much of the purpose of a price reduction if the main method that all players will receive credits from has been reduced by the same amount that the cost has been reduced.

But this has been a long time coming. After the beta closed, EA released a statement to their community promising that they were listening. Following the beta and their letter stating they were listening, EA made heroes only accessible by spending hundreds of dollars or dozens of hours of gameplay. This was after receiving thousands of angry responses to a very broken beta. As one Redditor pointed out, this is not an acknowledgement by EA or a concession; it’s a shell game.

This is also entirely in-line with the direction EA has stated they want to take the company in. EA has been touting for a long time that they believe the future of gaming is in subscriptions and microtransactions, even going so far as to discuss how their largest profit centers are from subscriptions, something they want to expand. Part of the reason that Visceral games was shut down was due to the fact that EA felt the Star Wars game they were working on could not be enjoyed for “a long time to come”, which could be translated to monetized for a long time to come, especially in light of the direction they have taken Battlefront 2.

EA has been hated for a long time. Whether it was through intrusive DRMs or forced systems like Origins, EA has never made the slightest attempt to please their customers. Though EA will continue to claim how much they listen to feedback, what it really amounts to is switching the attention away from the negative and letting people simply forget, and EA has done that very well for many years. There’s little reason to believe they won’t pull it off yet again.