College Football 27, the latest edition of the popular EA Sports video game series, has now officially been released, giving fans of college football all across the country something to do for the next six weeks before the start of the season.
This would normally be a cause for celebration, but many in both the gaming and college football community are less than pleased with the current iteration of the game.
While the first two releases of the new CFB game have been relatively untainted by the touch of “microtransactions,” it appears College Football 27 didn’t get off so cleanly.
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Fans of the game as well as content creators have taken to social media to voice their displeasure in EA’s decision to introduce microtransactions to offline modes of play, creating the hashtag #CFBPlayDontPay and tagging the developers in every post.
One content creator in particular who has been leading the charge is Bordeaux, a YouTuber with nearly 600,000 subscribers.
Bordeaux rose to prominence on the video platform thanks to his “rebuild” series from both the old NCAA football games and the new editions of the College Football game, but he hasn’t been shy about calling out the company for their latest transgressions.
“It just doesn’t feel like the direction I ever thought the college football games would go,” Bordeaux said in an exclusive interview. “I think whenever you’ve built up a game mode, and you’ve built up a community off of offline, single-player stuff never having those features… and you replace it with something like microtransactions, you really fracture a lot of the trust that you’ve built up.”
Throughout the interview, Bordeaux made it a point to separate the developers of the game from the company, claiming the game devs are “doing a great job.”
“I do believe the team that works on this game is doing a great job. They really care about it, and there’s a lot of passion that I’m able to see (that) seeps into these things whenever I’m down there,” Bordeaux explained.
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Despite the bad blood between he and EA, Bordeaux has stated that he still intends to play the game, but his partnership with the company may never be the same.
“The game is good, I’m not going to ever backtrack on that opinion,” Bordeaux said. “It’s just the fact that they’re putting those microtransactions in is where I have to draw the line and say ‘do not spend money on this.'”
Going into this, Bordeaux claims he never had a set goal in mind when it came to calling out EA for their choice to include microtransactions. He just wanted to speak his mind while raising awareness, and it ended up becoming something bigger.
When asked if there was any way EA could win back his trust, Bordeaux was blunt.
“Take out microtransactions completely, bring back all of the features that they removed, and never go in the direction of making “Dynasty” and “Road to Glory” a mode with microtransactions, especially offline.
“If they really took that stance, I’m okay again,” Bordeaux said. “But I don’t believe they will.”
Though that may sound pessimistic, it’s probably the correct take.
Once game developers smell money, it’s hard for them to reverse course (see: Grand Theft Auto: Online).
For Bordeaux, the message is simple: “Just have fun.”
“I want to load up (the game) and have fun in a ‘no-money-spent’ dynasty,” Bordeaux pleaded.
That certainly is the goal, but it may be wishful thinking on his part.
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that this saga has a happy ending.
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