Will this game have microtransactions?

This also might just be me, but I feel like the question of how best to monetize this game is one of the reasons it has had over a year longer development time than there was from GW1 to GW2.

It would make sense to me if they were originally aiming for a E3 2018 announcement, but due to the relatively recent (at the time) controversy over Battlefront 2's greedy monetization model, they had to rethink BFN's monetization model. This would explain the out of nowhere announcement of new content for GW2 at E3 2018. It wasn't just an attempt to renew interest in the series. It was an attempt to maintain their core audience until they reworked monetization. They would have especially needed to rework the model if it was similar to Battlefront 2's due to the outcry against such things possibly being aimed at children.

Then, I was wondering if they were actually going with a Free to Play model but waited for data on sales to come back from Apex. This would explain why they dropped such a heavy hints about BFN coming soon back in February on Twitter, but didn't officially announce the game until a few weeks ago. It would also explain the seemingly out of nowhere announcement and release of BFN. Very similar to what was seen with Apex.

But this is all conjecture. I'm glad they took the extra time and it shows in the gameplay. I just hope it also shows in the monetization. How to best monetize is perhaps the most difficult question currently plaguing the games industry, and I'm willing to bet BFN gets it fairly close to right.

Also, here's a link to the February tweet.

https://twitter.com/PlantsvsZombies/status/1092897215973023745