They were not invented this year, and were popularized at least by last year as you see with games like Overwatch, but the gaming trend of the year is the loot box. This exploitative idea takes the collectible card pack and brings it to the world of videogames, so instead of just getting items, or being able to buy them, you have the "privilege" of spending money on random chances for the item! Joy! You might get what you want, but you're far more likely to just be throwing your money away on nothing of note. It's bad stuff, but it has become popular because it works brilliantly. Some publishers have recently announced that look boxes make them more money than game sales, in fact, and given their exploding popularity this isn't too surprising.
So, seeing the potential money they can extract from their customers, the way every game implements loot boxes is different, but what most major game releases this year have in common is having a loot box system of some kind. Sometimes the boxes only contain cosmetic items, but sometimes they also contain items which directly affect play. Sometimes you can only get the boxes with real-money purchases, sometimes you can buy them or get them ingame... though they're almost always designed to make you want to spend that money, of course, and not rely only on the free ones. Etc.
There has been criticism of loot boxes from many gamers, though, for how they exploit people to get money out of them, for how they are basically gambling in that you spend money without knowing what you're getting for it, how they don't usually tell you the likelihood of getting any one particular reward and the good ones drop quite rarely, and more. These criticisms are, I would say, largely very accurate. Apart from the baseball cards I bought as a kid I've generally stayed away from random-draw gaming stuff myself, and playing Overwatch now has made me think about how this fundamentally really good game is being held back by its annoying loot box system. Why can't you just get money, to get the things you want with? I know, the answer is "because it makes Activision-Blizzard more money this way", but that does not make it okay or good game design! "Here's cool looking stuff, but you only have any chance of getting it if you throw a lot of money at us" is REALLY obnoxious game design and it hurts the game, as fun as it is to play. And this stuff is apparently in almost EVERYTHING now, Nintendo console games excepted... though with how they've now adopted microtransactions otherwise, I expect to see them soon in Nintendo games as well I imagine. Ugh.
On that note, I have been disappointed to see how enthusiastically Nintendo has gone for microtransactions. Oh, things like DLC addons to games are just fine, but then you have pure money-sinks like the Badge Arcade for 3DS... ugh! That thing exists just to take your money and give you nothing of note, because those badges sure aren't useful. I haven't spent anything in the Badge Arcade myself, but I'm sure many people have because of how few free plays you get, and that's too bad. At one point Nintendo was better than this, but not anymore sadly. Too bad.
Loot boxes don't benefit anyone except the game companies. Every game they appear in is worse for having them. That's all I have to say.
Edit: No I have more to say. I hate how "badge arcade" is basically a glorified loot box itself, well more of a glorified claw machine. I find myself saying this a lot lately: "Can't I just, like, BUY the game?" I also have this to say of amiibo. It's expensive DLC. That's all it is. At first, Nintendo was nice enough to let different versions of the same character serve the same unlock function, but that's dead now. All the different Link amiibos are required to get all the outfit sets in BOTW.
BOTW is a fine game, and it lacks loot boxes, but that amiibo DLC doesn't feel like an accomplishment. I didn't find an ancient shrine to heroes past, then crawl through a dungeon finding a piece at a time until I had the whole set. I just scanned in a toy. I've said this before, but all the "toys to life" games are a wasted opportunity. Skylanders, Infinity, Amiibo, they all are just chunks of plastic. Yes, if someone is a toy collector they are generally well made enough, but even as toys they kinda fail because none of them (except the BOTW guardian amiibo) are even poseable.
Let's just add onto the pile the annoying "pre order exclusive" artificial scarcity DLC which already ruined any sense of getting a "complete" game and "on disc dlc", wherein content that is ALREADY in the game needs a purchase to unlock (the monopoly money used for resetting timers in mobile games is included on this list, as well as, once again, all the toys to life games). Season passes were originally a sort of "bargain", but what kind of bargain? I'm paying for something that doesn't even exist in the hopes that it'll be something I want? I'm taking a bet against myself. Doom 4's season pass is probably one of the worst offenders, being that in the end every last bit of it turned out to be nothing but skin packs for the worst part of that game (the "let's shove in level grinding in a mode that no one wants it in" multiplayer). But hey, they bait you into it with "freemium" bonus crap (so, on-disc dlc) you get immediately when you drop 20-40 dollars on their season pass. Since those season passes, so far, still exist long after the content they are passes for is released, that's my new strategy. I'll wait until the season is over then pick up the whole set only AFTER I decide if that content is worth it or not.
Breath of the Wild, I've said before, champions a rethink of how game hints are designed, going for in-universe methods of finding information or tracking things. Great! The DLC for BOTW, however, flies against this by resorting to that tired old "You heard a rumor that" hook the very instant you log into your save file. When did I hear that rumor? I didn't hear any rumor. You just TOLD me I heard a rumor in the vain hope that it somehow wouldn't break immersion (which it did).
Way too much DLC, for that matter, is of the game balance destroying variety. Let's look at Dead Space. How many "weapon packs" did all those games try and sell us? Do they unlock a quest to find said items, or a room somewhere I just need to survive long enough to stumble into? Do they just add a schematic but I still need to build the thing myself? No. You literally just start the game with ALL of the weapons out of the gate. This is a survival horror series, known for intentionally pacing resources so you have to manage it and really think through what risks you want to take, and it just GIVES you all this crap, every time, thus allowing you to just glide past the first half of the game without issue.
The day will come when a new Animal Crossing game is designed by stock holders, and every last item in Tom Nook's store will cost actual money dollars, except for Tom's mystery box, which costs bells, which are obtained by exchanging money dollars for them. This will be entirely in-character for Tom Nook, and it will also be the first Animal Crossing game I refuse to buy. You know, since they double dip by both charging for this nonsense AND making you pay full price for the game. You know, the games that are just getting too expensive so that charging $60 just isn't enough. They HAVE to, you see. Note that I paid $10 to see a movie with a Norse god running around with the mighty power to spend millions of dollars with a single toss of his great hammer. Blockbuster movies still cost more to make than blockbuster games. Hollywood has it's own idiotic problems, but at no point did someone in hollywood try to sell us DLC in the form of a "collector's edition" theatrical run with scenes not found in the cheaper alternative.
Speaking of collector's editions, I have in the past said that instead of exclusive game content, they should focus on exclusive physical goods. I like physical copies, but I think I made a mistake. They focused on physical goods alright. However, rather than fairly simple stuff like maybe a player's guide or a cloth map, we're getting ridiculous price gouging stuff in giant boxes I could fit 3 stacked XBoxes inside of. Those collector's editions are supposed to be the same price as the standard game, just with a little bonus. They aren't supposed to be giant toy boxes with the game in it.
Or... not.
That's right, the latest collector's editions, on top of not bothering to give you the season pass with the game you just paid $100 for, DON'T EVEN HAVE A GAME IN THEM! They are glorified physical loot crates at that point, and I don't have any room in my life for- what the hell is that? Is that a woman's bikini clad TORSO? A TORSO?! I'm trying NOT to look like a serial killer here game developers! This isn't helping! A "doll finger", outside the context of Resident Evil, honestly looks like the sort of calling card a Batman villain leaves behind.
And let's talk about "collector's coins" for a second. Oblivion had one, but in it's favor, it was made to look like the in-game currency. Nintendo has recently gotten into the habit of tossing in such coins in their games, but none of them are actually "from" anything. Mario Galaxy and Odyssey both included coins that were just silver coins with Mario himself emblazed upon them. Why can't I just have a nice in-game style Mario coin? The worst offender? Breath of the Wild. It included a collector's coin too. Let me repeat that. A Zelda game included a Zelda coin as a physical item. You know, the currency that Hyrule DOES NOT USE! The slightest thought and they would have known to make a cheap plastic rupee instead, but no thought went into it, so here we are, with a coin that would do little more than confuse the citizens of the game it's supposed to be "from" until some goron ate it.
It won't be long now before we start seeing this brought up on late night. Even if it's only illegal in Belgium, game companies are going to somehow need to justify to fans why it's necessary here, but completely missing there. We're all going to be begging companies to CUT content just like the overseas version didn't get.
That Dark Souls video there is pretty well done, lots of effort there just for a video... amusing video. :) (The only thing that video's missing is a fancy loot-box-opening animation. Otherwise it gets it just right!)
As for EA, it does sound like Battlefront II goes too far, but it's always interesting to see what gets attention. I mean, there have been so many games with loot boxes this year, and others in the past few years. Why now does a reaction against that suddenly explode in public like this? Is it just because everything has loot boxes now so something was going to get this reaction, and EA are the unlucky losers because that game is too prominent and puts too much of the game behind a loot-box system? If so that's a very fair reaction, but still, even if it is "only" cosmetic, games from previous years like Overwatch definitely do not deserve any kind of a pass here.
If this leads to a reduction in loot boxes in games that'd be fantastic, though. If we assume that the days of games actually shipping as a whole product you pay for once are sadly done, microtransactions are annoying and sometimes exploitative, but at least here you can get the thing you want, instead of having to buy random chances at maybe getting it and maybe not!
But it does have a fancy loot box opening animation! I hope you've played Dark Souls before. I know it's got a reputation as nail biting ridiculous hard, but it's not really so tough. It's not easy, but if you've played through older games you're more than prepared for it. What I mean is, the Souls games in particular would be particularly ruined, utterly and irrevocably, by a loot box system. Just to heap some more praise on the series, it has handled DLC just amazingly. They don't shove a bunch of "instant rewards" in your bag. They don't put a magic quest in your log saying "you heard a rumor that", and they don't even bother making sure you can access the DLC right out of the gate. The DLC fits in the universe naturally, so that if you didn't know you had it, it would feel just like another section of the game. It's just surprising how rarely that happens in games, so I have to praise it here.
The sad thing is, of course, that had loot boxes existed back in the mid '90s there absolutely would be games that do exactly that... aren't we lucky that such things didn't exist until recently?