EA Earns Guinness World Record For Pathetic Most Hated And Downvoted Comment On Reddit

EA doesn't have the most stellar of reputations in the gaming community and it is known for squeezing every possible penny out of gamers with very expensive microtransactions. One such money grab has landed EA a dubious distinction in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downvoted comment on Reddit.

The comment that earned EA the world record was one posted about the videogame Star Wars Battlefront II that launched in 2017. The official post from EA that inspired the record-setting 683,000 downvotes had to do with the microtransaction hell that EA created for gamers who wanted to unlock iconic characters like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

Gamer backlash against EA was intense due to the amount of credits necessary to unlock Vader and Luke; each character cost 60,000 credits to unlock. That was three times the amount of credits that players of the game would earn if they finished the campaign. The characters could be unlocked for free, but the grind to do so required players to spend about 40 hours for each character.

The EA post that earned so many downvotes said in part that EA had made the characters so difficult to unlock to give players a "sense of achievement" once they unlocked them. Many players of the game saw the difficulty for a free unlock as a money grab to force them to spend real money to obtain the characters out of frustration.

The backlash was so strong that a few days after EA's reviled comment was posted on Reddit, the game publisher killed microtransactions in the game temporarily. At least one analyst at the time sided with EA saying that gamers were overreacting.