EA on cosmetic game items: “You probably don’t want Darth Vader in pink”

Earlier this month community furor over perceived "pay-to-win" elements in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 led EA to temporarily pull microtransactions from the game entirely. But those community complaints wouldn't apply to the kind of cosmetic mictrotransactions seen in many other online multiplayer games, which offer new costumes or visual flair without directly affecting gameplay.

EA CFO Blake Jorgensen says those kinds of offerings probably aren't in the cards for Battlefront 2, though, because of EA and LucasArts' focus on "not violating the canon of Star Wars."

In a presentation at the Credit Suisse Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference yesterday, Jorgensen said that "cosmetic things" in Battlefront 2 are difficult to pull off without messing up a brand "that has been built over many, many years.... Darth Vader in white probably doesn't make sense compared to Darth Vader in black. Not to mention you probably don't want Darth Vader in pink—no offense to pink, but I don't think that's right in the canon."

While Jorgensen allowed that smaller things like purchasing colored lightsabers might be OK within the canon, in general "it's not as easy as if we were building a game in our own IP where it really didn't matter. It matters in Star Wars because Star Wars fans want realism."

This focus on brand integrity is a pretty big change from LucasArts' pre-Disney days, when a game like Microsoft's Star Wars Kinect could feature a happy, dancing Han Solo and Boba Fett jamming to a YMCA rip-off without any apparent canon violation. And the Battlefront series itself is already something of a living, breathing canon violation, throwing unrelated characters from across the Star Wars universe and timeline into extended "what if" battles with each other.

Jorgensen's comments line up with anonymous development sources quoted by VentureBeat earlier this month, who said that LucasArts helped put a stop to earlier plans for an in-game economic model based around purchasable skins, a la Overwatch. But they conflict a bit with comments from Associate Design Director Dennis Brannval, who suggested in a pre-release Reddit AMA that the team was working on cosmetic items for the game for a later date.

Elsewhere in his talk, Jorgensen admitted that the limited microtransaction testing developers conducted during the game's beta test was "not enough to really understand some of the reactions that we ultimately got." That said, he sees the current controversy over microtransactions as "a learning experience" in an effort to get to a place where people can enjoy playing "if you grind in the game, if you pay in the game, or both."

"We want people to play those games as we add content and events around them for years to come," he said. "If we're not making some mistakes along the way, that's when you should worry about it."