Money.
The weekend saw both Apex Legends‘ players and developers lose their cool and resort to namecalling over the implementation of microtransactions. Specifically, after last week’s Iron Crown event, these collectible items began to be sold. Including one skin that cost a whopping $170.
Fans were quick to blame Respawn Entertainment’s owner, EA (well known for this kind of bullshit), for the move. And if things stayed there, It would’ve been relatively fine. But it didn’t.
Respawn changed the event on Friday, so that all of the cosmetics were available in the normal store this week, for the standard pricing of Legendary skins ($18). Everything but that $170 one, which will instead be made available in lootboxes, no longer available for outright purchase. That post was cross-posted to Reddit, which is where things began to fall apart.
At some point after that, Respawn’s project lead Drew McCoy made the following comments:
We’ve said it before, but we will not engage with temper tantrums, and personal attacks or virtriolic threads are completely unacceptable. We took a look in the mirror this week (lol – thanks for all the attacks guys) and decided we hadn’t met up obligations and are making changes because we believe…
I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when players weren’t complete ass-hats to developers and it was pretty neat. I forged a bunch of long lasting relationships from back then. Would be awesome to get back there, and not engaging with toxic people or asking “how high” when a mob screams “jump” is hopefully a start.
The following comment was then made by a player:
Oh.. Well I guess you can also remember when developers weren’t money grabbing fucks that scammed their players too? Free to play blah blah blah that doesn’t give you any right to charge $20 for a skin you should be setting the tone for other company’s to follow and stop fucking your player base who commit their time to play you’re game. Good riddance to your game I loved it at release bought both season pass’s lvl 100, hundreds hours but after seeing how greedy you got (no surprise really as you’re ea’s bitch) the games uninstalled and anything from you in the future can die as quickly as its released IMO. And fuck anyone that’s saying this is better, like take there dick out your mouth and have some respect for yourself. Yes iv gone over the top and I can blame the whiskey all I like but iv gone from thinking oh shit these devs care to yep just as bad as ea’s reputation. You had no choice but to answer “risky” comments so get the fuck off your high horse.
To which McCoy replied:
Later on, McCoy tried to clarify, but the damage had been done:
No, I’m not trying to paint all players with a huge brush – I’m commenting on the fact that nowadays its just easier and less stressful to not post anywhere if you’re a dev. That sucks.
Well, If you ever wanted to know what flushing a fairly large amount of goodwill looked like, this is it.
Source: Kotaku
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