It’s always nice to talk about the gaming community coming together, joining hands to collectively speak out against practices they deem unfair, their voices loud enough to make them heard in spaces where a few strays shouts might not matter as much. Well, College Football 27 is going to remembered as a title that made that happen, and that’s a little sad since the gameplay on that one’s quite good.
But despite EA acknowledging that it “missed the mark” with paid progression systems that felt like they were there to replace something that was never a problem to begin with, we’re not entirely sure the studio has taken the right lessons away from the metaphorical conversation this time around. There wasn’t a clear promise that paid progression was not going to be a part of gameplay systems that were crucial to the experience, for starters.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re going to tell you what we think about the situation, and what we’d say are good things to keep in mind when College Football 28 eventually comes around. What’s happened now might just be step one in determining what happens next, after all.
The Cause and Effect
We understand how harmless DLC or cosmetics and the like are good ways to monetize games like CF27, and the studio might not have drawn as much flak as it has if that were the case. But to have paid progression in modes that were specifically built around investing time into a player or coach felt tantamount to the studio treating its game’s best features as an inconvenience that could be brushed aside with a bit of cash.
Road to Glory is a good place to start, since it takes a few seasons if you decide to opt for natural progression. But the option to buy skill points outright negates the journey that those seasons can bring, which has definitely been worth it in the years since the franchise rose out of dormancy. The same goes for Online Dynasty, where Coach Points are available to purchase if you want a leg-up in a mode that’s definitely fun, but treats maxing out your Coach as a reward earned the hard way. Yes, it’s more satisfying that way, especially with the new systems it brings, but does everybody have the time and ability to get there without pay-to-win principles at play?
On its own, their existence in CF27 wouldn’t have us frowning at where the franchise might go next, despite pop-ups that feel like they’re almost encouraging us to throw a little cash at the game to chop away at a few hours of fairly well designed single-player modes. It was as if EA was willing to sacrifice some of the game’s best features on the altar of Ultimate Teams, a mode where microtransactions were at least accepted.
We couldn’t help but feel the studio crossed a line by trying to encourage quicker progression on its single-player options which would ultimately leave Ultimate Team as the logical next stop. That it comes at the cost of its single-player options is egregious, with reports of faster XP sliders for coaches being dropped, and more concerning ones about a veil of secrecy surrounding the addition of pay-to-win options for RTG and Dynasty showcasing the sale of a relief from progression systems designed to work in favor of maximizing monetization by making two of its best modes feel like uphill battles instead of naturally progressing careers.
The fact that Ultimate Team has long been a high earner for EA showcases that the backlash its receiving isn’t because of in-game purchases, but because those optional purchases were cutting into a progression loop that was their very core mechanic, and the reason for playing them without skipping beats. The inclusion of paid progression systems was a blow to the perceived balance that these modes brought to the table, with doubts that it could have been better tuned instead of being deliberately slower to make paid shortcuts be a tempting option.
Ultimate Team is probably a good place for paid progression, since transactions there feed back into its gameplay loop and an established business model. But putting similar options into modes like Dynasty and Road to Glory felt like they were corrupting the reason for their very existence, and of course, the voices that mattered most rose up in a roar that might have filled a stadium, with tactics that made EA sit up and take notice.
Community imposed Consequences
The #CFBPlayDontPay campaign was probably among the first instances of public, organized backlash we came across when looking into what others had to say about the things we found wrong with RTG and Dynasty’s progression purchases. Individual players expressed a staunch refusal to buy purchase points, or even straight up stop playing the game.
Steam reviews can always become battlegrounds for a game’s future, and EA was probably unhappy with how they coincided with wider launch-week coverage that brought complaints that went beyond the early impressions of a hardcore College Football community engaging with it after Early Access on premium editions opened up. There was even criticism on EA’s own official forums, some of them supporting the hashtag with specific objections to RTG and Dynasty’s sneaky stowaways. Scattered criticism might have been easy for the studio to absorb, but a demand that was as clear and unified across the board as the one that has emerged is a lot harder to brush off.
We didn’t want cheaper rates on purchase points, or improved earning rates. We wanted pay-to-win systems in Dynasty and Road to Glory gone altogether, which was quite the ask. But it did ensure that EA couldn’t get away with vague promises of balances or patches down the road, but was forced to address the problem on its players’ terms or risk losing a significant chunk of them altogether across other franchises too. Well, it has since responded. And while the lot of us should pat ourselves on the back, we believe that paying close attention to what’s been said is an important part of realising what hasn’t.
Yes, the studio said that paid options didn’t deliver the value and expanded choice it had intended for players. That’s all well and good, but it went on to say that its plans for CFB 28 and beyond included live-service features that were valuable, and that it would be more transparent about telling us about them. Those are steps that seem to address a problem that doesn’t exist instead of the one that’s right in front of it.
It was never about the perceived value of paid progression, or the lack of transparency in telling us about it. Those were just symptoms of the larger problem, which was that they did not belong in modes like RTG and Dynasty to begin with. But EA didn’t talk about that, and didn’t assure us that gameplay advantages are going to be permanently separate from the ability to purchase them, or that microtransactions are going right back to Ultimate Team where they belong. That the studio has not acknowledged that is why we think we need to keep a close eye on College Football 28.
Why is that? Glad you asked!
The Winds of Change
We’re hoping that EA learns that core progression in titles that comes at the asking price of one like CF27 should not be monetized in its single-player offerings. We’re equally worried that all it’s going to do is just announce them earlier and speed up progression just about enough to make it look like it isn’t deliberately slow, ditch the pop-ups, lower prices on bundles and include more value in them, and call it a day. It could even circle around critical reviews by launching such a system after embargoes, or just rebrand purchases and options accelerators, or hide them behind subscriptions or premium rewards.
All of these are potential approaches to bring back a monetization mechanic that’s going to cause the same friction, simply because EA is approaching the situation like its free market research on a failed first experiment. That’s precisely why we think we need to keep a close eye on a bunch of parameters in CFB 28, such as its progression speed, XP setting and player control over progression, premium archetypes or bonuses being tied to more expensive additions with obvious gameplay advantages, save-specific purchases, the timing of when they’re announced, and even post-lunch updates.
Some good things to look out for, if EA takes the right ideas to the table, would be meaningful content in expansions, consistently new historical challenges, better presentation packages with additional commentary or broadcast packages, cosmetics, stadium traditions, post-launch modes that needed more time cooking, and of course, balancing and authenticity updates outside of the paid ecosystem.
We’ve made our voices heard once. It’s time to do it again, albeit a tad more proactively this time. We know what we’re asking for, as we always have. We don’t believe in not wanting paid progression in Dynasty, Road to Glory, or in systems that are balanced around optional spending instead of actual progress is an unreasonable demand from entitled players at all. The control we’ve always had over Player XP and progression speed is definitely a must, as is avoiding repetitive purchases across new saves. We’re already paying for a full-priced annual release, after all, and its two most important offline modes need to have systems that do not let you jump ahead too far.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that while EA’s swift response to our protests is indeed commendable, one reversal isn’t a set boundary yet. And if that boundary is to be normalized, organized criticism is always better than a few lone voices pointing to a cold draft that has crept in since the studio left the door ominously open on the return of paid progression in its future titles.
Still, the victory remains ours, and we’re quite confident that the lot of you are going to see this one through over the course of next year. It’s now time to focus on football.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
