The negative news that "Battlefield 2042" has exposed one after another may no longer be considered news.
When the game was first released in November 2021, Battlefield 2042 was on the verge of becoming the lowest-rated game ever on Steam due to a large number of gameplay issues, numerous bugs, and poor optimization. Since then, several small updates have slightly recovered some of the reputation, but only increased the game’s praise rate from 10% to around 30%.
The number of active players is a faithful feedback on the quality of the game. In the past four months, Battlefield 2042 has lost nearly 100,000 players on the Steam platform alone. Since February, the number of online players has only been four digits, lower than the predecessors Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5. For a shooter game that focuses on multiplayer combat, such a loss of players is undoubtedly quite lethal.
Unable to wait for an update that would revolutionize Battlefield 2042, players decided to resort to the most extreme measure: a refund.
Of course, every game platform, from PC to console, has a refund policy. Steam requires players to make a request within 14 days of purchase and to play the game for no more than two hours. Console platforms have a more restrictive policy for digital games, unless there is a serious problem with the game, such as when Sony and Microsoft relaxed the refund policy when Cyberpunk 2077 was released.
Under the influence of bugs and technical problems, many players were unable to experience any complete game during the refund period. It has become an inevitable demand of these players to call on the major platforms that released "Battlefield 2042" to relax the refund policy.
In January, a person who identified himself as "Satoshi Nakamoto" posted a petition on the American petition website Change.org. The petition was aimed at the development team of the "Battlefield" series, DICE, the Steam platform, Sony, Microsoft, and the Federal Trade Commission, which protects the rights of American consumers. The goal is to obtain a full refund for players on all platforms where "Battlefield 2042" has been released.
Battlefield 2042, the petition notes, is "a mockery of every player who bought a game because of EA’s false claims." EA and DICE released the game after failing to live up to a lot of their promotional promises, and their Battlefield 2042 was released in a nearly unplayable version. Four months later, the game still has a large number of bugs that seriously affect the experience.
The author believes that "billion-dollar companies making unfinished games and publishing false propaganda" is a kind of "abuse" and "bullying" against players, which cannot be tolerated by the general player community.
To that end, he said that if the petition received more than 50,000 signatures, he would contact some of the "best class action lawyers" to take EA and DICE to court.
At first, the petition did not receive much attention. However, the official announcement of Battlefield 2042 to postpone the update twice in a row gave the petition a wave of help.
On February 1, the official website of Battlefield 2042 announced that the first season of the major update will be released at the beginning of this summer, which means that players who have long been bored with the existing content will have to wait three or four months to play the new thing. The announcement also mentions several upcoming and undetermined minor updates, which plan to introduce features such as scoreboards, voice communication and player profiles present on all major platforms, although these features do not solve the game’s most lethal stability and gameplay problems.
* Announcement on Chinese official website
Battlefield 2042 removed the scoreboard for unknown reasons. Many players hoped that this simple feature would return, and officials have received feedback to put it on the update schedule. It is expected that an update of the actual scoreboard in mid-to-late February will also provide a conceptual graph that looks inseparable.
* Official scoreboard conceptual graph
However, on February 3, the official Twitter suddenly announced that the scoreboard, together with related minor updates, would be delayed until early March.
Big updates and small updates have been released one after another, breaking the hearts of players. After February 3, the number of people who followed the refund petition on the Change website grew rapidly. In just one week, the number of signatures of the petition grew from 700 to hundreds of thousands. By the time of this article, nearly 190,000 people had participated in the petition. Including the US media "Newsweek", more than 240 news articles in the United States alone have followed and reported on the petition.
Battlefield 2042 Petition: Why Players Are Right to Ask for Refunds
When the number of signatories exceeded 120,000, the petition author updated a log. The log noted that he noticed that EA’s relevant agreement may have protected them from litigation, but he still felt there was a way to deal with it.
There are no laws or regulations prohibiting companies from selling unfinished games as final products. If class-action lawsuits don’t work out, he will try to contact a U.S. senator to draft legislation that would create a "done definition" for paid games, protecting consumers from games that require high prices.
* "Definition of Done"
Although the number of people participating in the petition has exceeded the peak of Steam players in Battlefield 2042, Change.org is just a petition website, which allows anyone to petition anonymously, and does not investigate whether the petitioner has actually bought the game in advance. It may express some expectations of the public, but it has no authority and actual legal effect.
Even if the author of the petition is really the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, "Satoshi Nakamoto", it is difficult to say that this petition will not end without a result. However, the views raised by the author in the petition and the dissatisfaction and anger of the players exposed in the petition should bring some kind of warning to the entire game industry:
Not all games are called "No Man’s Sky". For a game to hit the shelves at the price of a full game, it is better to make a relatively complete game at the outset than to rely on countless subsequent updates to make up for the incompleteness of the game.
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