From what I found, Star Wars holds roughly 10 Guinness World Records. It recently added one more, but sadly this one does not merit celebration…or does it? Thanks to Reddit and the dubious gaming company EA, Star Wars adds the most down-voted comment ever on Reddit.
Source of the World Record
The roots of this record reach back to 2017 and the release of Battlefront II. A player bought the game for $80, but his favorite player (Vader) remained locked and needed to be unlocked through Loot boxes. In other words, players needed to fork out even more money to obtain things in a game they already paid for. An EA manager responded to the original post with the following:
“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”
EA Community Manager on Reddit
Thus began the public push back and dismantling of the EA pay-to-play system of gaming. Sure, EA kept purchases alive, but instead of main characters and ships, players only upgraded cosmetic changes.
The previous record for down-votes sat at under 89,000 votes. The down-votes against this manager’s response set a new record of a whopping 683,000 votes! The old world record was shattered by roughly 7.5X times the old record. Like it or not, this may be one world record Star Wars owns for quite some time. The new record appears in the Guinness World Records book for 2020.
Far Reaching Ramifications
EA took a great deal of heat for their pay-to-play format, and changed other games that featured the same style of transactions. In fact the ramifications reach into today’s Star Wars.
The next Star Wars video game to hit markets will be this fall. On Nov 15, Jedi: Fallen Order lands on shelves and also belongs to EA. When we first previewed the game during Celebration 2019, EA stated emphatically the game would be a one time purchase game with no add-ons, no extra levels, or other pay to get extras. Players will pay a one time fee from $50-60 depending on locations, and they will own everything there is to own for the game. This is a rarity in today’s world.
