You Will Never See an EA Game Without Microtransactions
Mass Effect: Andromeda gameplay designer, Manveer Heir, revealed some interesting things about EA on the latest Waypoint Podcast. Being an ex-BioWare employee, he would have observed company’s priorities first-hand.
Now working as an independent developer, Heir revealed EA’s bottom line. As many might be aware, the big publisher recently shut down Visceral Game Studios, the team behind the critically-acclaimed Dead Space series and Battlefield: Hardline. In so doing, they aborted the Uncharted-like Star Wars experience that was in development. Fans of single-player stories, therefore, will have to make do with whatever replaces the project. As a matter of fact, according to Heir, we’re unlikely to see any linear titles in the future.
“It’s definitely a thing inside of EA,” said Heir, “they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better. The words in there that were used are ‘have them come back again and again’. Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is because micro-transactions: buying card packs in the Mass Effect games, the multiplayer. It’s the same reason we added card packs to Mass Effect 3: how do you get people to keep coming back to a thing instead of ‘just’ playing for 60 to 100 hours?
“The problem is that we’ve scaled up our budgets to $100 million plus and we haven’t actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can’t we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don’t actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for.”
Heir goes even further and talks about the effect of microtransactions since their implementation in Mass Effect 3. In sum, there’s almost no chance we’ll ever see an EA game without them.
“I’ve seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards. You’ve seen – what is BioWare’s new franchise coming out?” he asked.
“Anthem,” Waypoint Radio’s host answered.
“Right,” Heir said. “It’s not a traditional-looking BioWare game, right? If that’s what you’re seeing from a place like BioWare, owned by EA, a place where I worked for seven years; if that’s what you’re seeing from Visceral now closing and going to this other Vancouver studio; what it means is that the linear single-player triple-A game at EA is dead for the time being.”