Well...this is disappointing. Cosmetics? Fine. In-game abilities...sigh.
It's interesting to see so many people who seem to think that cosmetic-only lootboxes were going to be the norm instead of "pay2win." It's not surp
People keep bringing up Overwatch, but the reason cosmetic lootboxes work so well there is because of how well Blizzard got people to be invested in the characters. Not only that, but there's high visibility of each player's character in-game, meaning you're always seeing them, usually up close, and teams are small (6v6, 4v4, 3v3, or 1v1). So you can consistently see them and their awesome new legendary skin or whatever. This is only further pushed by things like the victory screen, where you can see the winning team's characters, and plays of the game. They also have time-limited events, which basically pressures people into dropping serious cash to get them, especially when some players don't have the time to grind it out.
But in games like Battlefront and Battlefield, you're just another faceless soldier, one of 63/39 other people on the field. There's always so much else going on, you're not going to be paying attention to what skin other people have on the majority of the time. Plus there's only so much you can do in the way of cosmetics in some of these games. Like with Battlefront, Dice can't go around making whatever they want because it has to be approved by Disney, and Battlefield, it has to match the tone of the game, so skins wouldn't stand out as much. Overwatch has a ton of wacky crazy skins that get your attention (which is another reason they're so successful). Really you could have an entire discussion on lootboxes in Overwatch and why it works so well, but that's best saved for another time.
tl;dr - they aren't doing cosmetic lootboxes only because nobody would care and nobody* would buy them.
*I say this in a
very relative sense
And maybe purely cosmetic stuff wouldn't have brought in enough money in their estimation.
basically this