Anyone that has paid attention to anything during the past 15 years of gaming knows that there are a handful of gaming publishers and developers that have, at the very least, exploited and manipulated their player-bases solely for profit and in most cases deliver a product that is half-finished at best and “early access” at worst. Today I want to focus on EA, as they have a long history of screwing over franchises and doing the absolute most to make ads much money as they can off of an IP even if it means alienating the fanbases that made their IP popular in the first place. When Apex was released, I was cynical because I thought this was just an excuse to allow Respawn to keep the Titanfall universe fresh while adapting it to the growing Free-To-Play Battle Royale genre. When I saw that this game has potential, my next thought was “how is EA going to destroy this game in their quest to make more money?” EA and free to play usually means massive and expansive microtransactions. As I went over in my last post, the Crafting Material/Legend Token/Apex Coin system is a nice balance of free grinding and pay to skin action and while I do have an issue with the grinding for pointless currency but hey, they have to make money somehow right? With Season 2 they made the battle pass a great value in terms of having a wide selection of what item you can get with the free tokens and crafting materials it gave you.
I give all this background to get into the Apex Iron Crown event. Unlike the event that occurred during the last season, there is a new component that has been added: (special) Apex Packs! To not explain what you can read in more detail in other places, Essentially, the Iron crown even contains its special Apex Packs, which can give u either one of 24 different cosmetic items as part of the collection, or crowns, which are essentially a rebranded crafting material for the event item shop which turns into crafting material at the end of the event. In addition to the item shop and Apex Packs, there is a special heirloom set for bloodhound (citation) that can only be unlocked if you unlock all 24 items as part of the event then pay 3700 legend tokens to purchase it.
It should go without saying that paying for all the apex packs needed to get all the items on top of the 37 bucks to buy the set is an exercise in incredibly irresponsible purchasing. The only people that feasibly will spend that much are people who either have more money than sense (or a parent with good credit) or content creators. For the latter, the content pays for the expense of buying the micro-transactions but is free guaranteed income for the developer. It makes me wonder sometimes if this ridiculous paid cosmetic content isn’t even meant for normal people to buy: it's a signal to the top purchasers to spend spend spend. The funny thing is that unlike Fortnite where the spending populations are kids and teenagers with their parent's finances at their disposal, the Apex player base is more mature and more averse to making silly purchases. I hope that EA has seen that if you want to get people to give you ROI on a free game, you must make it worth it for people to open up their digital wallets for you.*
Since I originally wrote this post, apex has had a couple of events and they have not been a complete money grab compared to the first event. I have every reason to believe that this is because so many people voted with their wallets (myself included) and did not purchase any iron crown packs. I think that although EA is still a money-hungry, developer killing game publisher, they are allowing Respawn to take feedback and apply it to the game (sorta). I commend Respawn for recently adding a dev tracker so we can work closely with the developers to keep improving apex. Also, charms are the shit, In my next post I want to shift focus to Modern Warfare, which has a pretty interesting take on giving microtransactions