We need more information on season passes

Season passes have been a very common thing for the past few years. They offer a decent discount if you are interested in getting all the DLC for a particular game. Some gamers will hiss at the mere mention of a season pass. Personally, I think season passes are okay…when they’re done right.

Recently there has been backlash about season passes from the gaming community. One that comes to mind is the Arkham Knight season pass. WB was asking for $40 for it, but they hadn’t even announced what would be in the season pass at the time of its release. And then we saw history repeat itself, as EA has done the same with their season pass for the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront. EA wants you to fork over $50 for four expansion drops. You may be asking: what exactly is in these expansions? Well, we don’t know yet. EA has said it will give more information in the coming weeks.

This is unacceptable.

EA is expecting people to pay roughly two-thirds the value of a standard edition of Battlefront for content that no ones knows about yet. Why wait and tell us what we can expect to come out of the season pass? Are they trying to hide something? Is it a move to get more money from us without delivering more content? EA could have easily pushed back the season pass announcement a week so they could give us information on its contents at the same time. Surely someone at EA saw the backlash that WB got for their Arkham Knight seaon pass. Did they just ignore that? 

Now, I have nothing against season passes. They’re a great way to get a small discount on DLC for a game. But game developers need to learn that they can’t just give us a season pass and tell us little to no information on what content we’ll get out of it. The only developer I can think of that can maybe get away with this is Bethesda, and that’s only because of their brilliant track record with DLC. Other developers don’t have this kind of luxury. We fans have been burned in the past, and now we have trust issues.

I hope that game developers will be able to learn from these past mistakes, and that we get a bit more information about future season passes so we can make better informed decisions when purchasing them.  For now, all we can do and wait and see if these game developers are willing to change, or if history will just keep repeating itself.