Why doesn't enterprise IT enrage users as much as Star Wars Battlefront II?

The Force isn't strong with us

There's a video game called Star Wars: Battlefront II, and in a matter of a couple of days, this piece of software's user base has fundamentally overhauled the way it functions, is monetised, and probably is developed in the future. The outcry was unprecedented, and the reaction by publisher EA (and, I expect more crucially, IP holder Disney) unexpectedly swift and decisive.

It concerned what have become known in gaming parlance as ‘loot boxes' - paying real world money ‘microtransactions' to enter a user into a kind of lottery and enable them to pick up a range of in-game items. They're popular as a monetisation approach in many games these days, allowing players to buy customisation for characters - hats or logos, perhaps - weapons or, in the controversial case of Battlefront, actual developmental advantages for player.

Accusations of the game encouraging players to ‘pay to win' were rife from the title's launch on the 17^th of November, and on the very same day, player outrage was such that the loot boxes were entirely removed.

While there's a delicious rumour doing the rounds that EA CEO Andrew Wilson received a direct, enraged call from Disney CEO Bob Iger in full-on Star Wars custodian mode, there's still no bones about it: millions of people hated a decision a technology company made, and forced them to fundamentally alter the way a product worked by threatening to withhold short or longterm investment.

A similarly, possibly even more, remarkable thing happened at Microsoft's Xbox One reveal at the E3 conference in 2013. The company came in fast and hard with an ambitious plan to introduce user profile-based DRM, make physical discs a thing of the past, and essentially obliterate the pre-owned games market.

People weren't having it, and by release, Microsoft had been forced to butcher the new games console's software architecure to shoehorn full disc support back in, and remain the status quo - such was the tech giant's terror at its loyal fans defecting to Sony's PlayStation 4.

Over here in the enterprise IT camp, we can only look at these examples of users voting with their feet and making tech giants u-turn on a dime with absolute envy.

In IT, if your server hardware and your chosen software don't play ball together or with your other systems, you'll often be waiting years for the vendor's whim to offer you a way forward. If everyone's annoyed with their dusty pile of legacy database licenses, there's often nothing that can be done to navigate the technical nightmare except making a one-to-one direct plea to your sales contact, strictly off-record and all gentlemanly-like. Usually to be fobbed off.

Why aren't we all kicking off, publicly, every single day of the week? Where's the passion? Is it because it's not our money, and it's only our business's? Is it because we've decided it's all just too much of a headache to challenge the status quo?

As somebody brilliantly observed on Reddit today, "if Reddit was half as verbal about net neutrality as they are about Star Wars Battlefront II, then we could stop ISP's and the FCC".

Quite.

We could also stop lazy and degenerate post-sales support, slow integration of new features, lousy customer service and, at a basic level, one-sided business models where ‘the house always wins' and IT coffers are drained by slow-moving, incumbent contracts with vendors too complacent to change much, or change it quickly.

Obviously, buying a single, plastic games console and connecting it to the internet to shoot people is a little less complicated than managing an international enterprise full of tens of thousands of interconnected licenses and products, but my point is - look how quickly things can change amid a chorus of abject rage over a mere video game.

To me, it's a salutary reminder that we've got the internet, it's bloody powerful, and everyone moans about something all at the same time, it can get almost anything done within minutes, rather than the bevy of excuses you'll get if you try to be polite and personable.

Surely ‘power to the people' extends beyond overhyped fictional space operas? If millions of voices crying out in anguish over something so simple can change something so instantly, imagine the progress we could make if we all reacted in the same spirit to something that, you know, actually matters?