Strongly disagree. I think the loot boxes are fundamentally manipulative and the way it slowly starves players over time to incentivise loot box purchases is very poor practice.
Battle passes too, require a fair bit of time and rely on the fear of missing out.
Let's compare to say Bloodhunt, which has no loot boxes, a battle pass but one with fast progression, and I think Apex comes off very poorly.
I think this is also true when comparing to games like Fortnite too.
Obviously there are others like Call of Duty and FIFA which I think are worse as they have pay to win elements on top of the rest, but those are a problem too. Their existence doesn't excuse the games that are slightly less exploitative.
I'm not too sure. Battlepasses usually work on FOMO but that's how it is. I stopped opening most of the loot boxes a some weeks ago (maybe two months at best?) and have about 30+ there, so I'm really not too sure about them having starving players to purchase them.
FOMO with Fortnite battle pass is much stronger. Because if you don't have it you're gonna basically miss the entire point of it being a platform for cross-media stuff. You can pick stuff to unlock which is cool, but it's still locked based on playing a lot and that's just the usual thing.
I have no idea about Bloodhunt so that's good at least.
I mean, it's not that Apex is super open with its stuff, just that it doesn't really pushes you to spend money. I have only spent on a battle pass several seasons ago and always get a lot of stuff plus the coins to renew the next pass, and it's been like 3 or 4 seasons in a row I haven't completed. Always have enough materials to craft a skin I really like, etc. Barely a splash screen that tells you to visit the store. Games like Fortnite reminds you quite often about how you can spend money in there.
