Quick recap on some things: a few years back, Disney bought LucasFilm. Almost immediately, Disney closed down LucasFilm's games division, LucasArts, cancelling the hotly-anticipated Star Wars game 1313.
Then EA announced it was taking over the Star Wars gaming brand, later announcing that Amy Hennig - the architect of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series - would be coming aboard to develop a brand new, story-based, Star Wars experience with EA's Visceral Games (the team behind the well-regarded Dead Space series).
In the meantime, EA had a big hit with Star Wars Battlefront.
Fast forward to earlier this year. EA cancels Hennig's Star Wars game, shuts down Visceral, and says that it's going to instead focus on "a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore."
The Frostbite engine, in case you're unaware, is mostly used for EA's online multiplayer games, such as the Battlefield titles. "Agency" in case you're unaware, is a word that most of us never heard or used until about three years ago, when it became popular with games journo types, and it makes my skin crawl every time I hear it. Like when somebody shortens the word "radiators" to "rads". You know: in the way that somebody awful would do.
Anyway, cue outrage over what appears to be EA wanting to make multiplayer Star Wars games, purely so that it can rinse players dry with microtransactions.
However, according to Kotaku, there was more to the story. Except... then Star Wars Battlefront 2 arrived, loaded with microtransactions which made popular characters difficult to access without spending money. Cue outrage. Cue politicians getting involved. Cue EA removing microtransactions from Battlefront 2, after failing to convince players - via a widely reviled statement on Reddit - that the game was structured in this way to improve their experience.
The publicity over all of this has been a PR disaster for EA. Battlefront 2 - which should've been a guaranteed smash - has done worse than expected. Therefore, you'd expect EA to have learned its lesson and change course.
Apparently not now that we live in an era where nobody takes any degree of responsibility for their actions.