They probably saw the patents Activision had out in regards to loot boxes and knew they needed to step up their game or it would be taken from them.

Competition.

...by a yuge margin!

It'll still sell millions though, because it's Star Wars and a AAA game.

Why?

I don't know man... Been looking at the subreddit yesterday. And the anger is real, it's universal and there's a lot of pictures with people cancelling pre orders. Of course the game is gonna sell, but if EA sees enough preorder cancellations, we might see them back down somewhat in their next releases... I heard rumours  on the reddit of around 70k cancellations. It's not a lot in the grand scheme of things but 70k cancels in 1 day has to be scary for EA especially considering the day 1 sales and preorders are crucial for how much retailers buy of stock from the publishers. Big preorder cancellations might make retailers decrease their initial order or future ones.... But again I don't know if the numbers are real, but if it's enough, gamestop and the likes will propably be a bit more cautious buying copies from EA. 

To be fair the problem with online shooters, other than Call of Duty is that the playerbase always got split up too much when they added paid for maps. Now that alot of shooters are ditching paid maps such as this game, Titanfall and a few others it doesn't surprise me that we now have a really strong emphasis on loot boxes and micro transactions.

EA have definitely made this game far too grindy, when it's already a full price release, however as a fan of the FPS genre I must admit I do praise EA's decision to stop paid for maps in Titanfall, Battlefront, and I believe in Battlefield One is no longer paid for maps right because of the new revolution edition which includes the season pass?

Either way I cancelled my pre-order for this game as I am far too busy with other games right now for this.

Ditching paid maps/season passes that fragment the player base is indeed a good thing, and no, it shouldn't surprise anyone that publishers who make this move would look for other ways to make up for that lost income. However, a pay to win progression system - as is in place here with Battlefront 2 - is most certainly not the answer. You wanna throw in a bunch of microtransactions for cosmetics, fine. We all know there are plenty enough people out there willing to throw down no insignificant amount of cash for alternate character skins and shit. This pay to win BS though, with loot boxes containing ridiculous power upgrades and things of that nature, is frankly worse than paid DLC/season passes, because now you're not even waiting until the first DLC drops to fragment the player base.....you're doing it on day one. Splitting them up into people who are cool with throwing buckets of cash to instawin, and everyone else who just wants to play the damn game, but now are simply forced to endure getting shit on by people who already have all the advantages, with no way of catching up in any reasonable amount of time unless you also spend money.

That's the problem with EA in a nutshell. Shitty games with licenses attached that will guarantee millions of sales, i.e. Star Wars, the NFL, and FIFA. As long as EA holds a monopoly on those licenses, they can churn out all the crap they want and use every kind of bad payment model out there, and people will still blindly buy their stuff.

Its so sad how many amazing franchises EA is holding hostage. :'(