Burned by the massive controversy they so foolishly caused with the aggressive monetization of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 with its loot boxes, EA made a conscious decision to move away from that model with its upcoming releases. It was made quite clear pretty early on that BioWare’s upcoming shared world shooter would have no loot boxes, and would only feature cosmetic microtransactions to boot. Recently, while speaking on Twitter, the game’s lead producer Michael Gamble re-iterated that once again.
When queried by a bafflingly angry person on Twitter about the game’s monetization policies, and why BioWare hadn’t been talking about things such as microtransactions and mentioned how (or if) they will be pricing post-launch content, Gamble moved quickly to make it clear that the game won’t have loot boxes, while also speaking of the content that the costlier Legion of Dawn edition will come with at launch.
While it is understandable to be wary of monetization methods in any game being published by EA, BioWare deserved credit for making it clear early on that loot boxes, at the very least, aren’t going to be a thing in Anthem. How the monezation policies that do exist within the game affect it – if they affect it – is something that remains to be seen. Meanwhile, whether or not Anthem’s post-launch expansions will follow the model laid down by Activision with Destiny, or whether EA will do what they are doing with Battlefield 5 and make it all free (like Ubisoft is doing with The Division 2 as well) isn’t something we know much about at this stage.
At any rate, Anthem launches on February 22 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The game will be receiving a demo later this month.
We aren’t going to add loot boxes. It serves no purpose. The cosmetics and mtx plan is what we’ve outlined. Legion of dawn is 4 new armour packs. They aren’t just skins. Each javelin has 4 armour bits. You get 16 with LOD + wpn + other goodies
— Michael Gamble (@GambleMike) January 11, 2019
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