EA will be building microtransactions into all of its upcoming games

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Grand Master

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EA will be building microtransactions into all of its upcoming games

Microtransactions have become an increasingly important part of the gaming landscape, and it looks like EA is embracing the concept with open arms. EuroGamer reports that Blake Jorgensen, the company's CFO and executive vice-president, discussed the tiny transactions at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference yesterday ? saying EA would be adopting them in all of its upcoming titles. "The next and much bigger piece is microtransactions within games," he said when asked about the company's digital revenues. "We're building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level, to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business."

He went on to explain that EA has built a new back-end system to process the transactions, a departure from its previous efforts. While plans for specific games weren't detailed, the emphasis on microtransactions ? as well as EA's new unified login system ? make it clear that EA sees its digital initiatives as important not only to consumers, but to the company's bottom line as well.

Source: The Verge

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Grand Master

TheLegendOfMart

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Gee what a surprise, why ship a complete game when you can split it up into little payments.

I can't wait for the next videogame crash, getting tired of being bent over a barrel with these massive corporations.

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Grand Master

McKay

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Valve has managed to implement this in an awesome way in TF2, can't help but think EA will mess up somehow.

EA has implemented "Pay to win" in pretty much all of their games. They'll do it like they always do.

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Grand Master

Chasethebase Reporter

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To be honest, we all expected this. Unfortunately EA do it in a way that almost requires you to pay up, and that's sad.

Valve on the other hand do it in a manner that's "You can get it now for ?X, or you can wait and use the item drop system to eventually craft it yourself for nothing." It's a system that works very well.

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Grand Master

thealexweb

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EA has implemented "Pay to win" in pretty much all of their games. They'll do it like they always do.

I like that in TF2 every weapon has a upside and a downside, it gives no player with a lot of happy a definite advantage. But we can look fabulas with our hats :)

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Grand Master

The Teej

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Gee what a surprise, why ship a complete game when you can split it up into little payments.

I can't wait for the next videogame crash, getting tired of being bent over a barrel with these massive corporations.

I don't entirely see what you mean - microtransactions just mean you pay for items that would normally take you a lot longer to get.

The best example that I can think of on the spot would be in an RPG, where you could either grind for ages to acquire enough money to buy a Level 30 shield, or alternatively you can just pay ?1.99 and get it straight away and make the game a bit easier for you.

At the end of the day people are complaining but there are a myriad of examples of microtransactions being done right and EA have even implemented microtransactions in a reasonable fashion in Dead Space 3. If microtransactions help keep the price of their games down then that's fine by me.

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Rising Star

togermano

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Are you kidding me? Sim City is their golden child of microtransactions. Oh look, a new building type, only $1! Godzilla attacks for $1.99? OK!

I hope not

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Grand Master

spacer

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The F2P and micro-transaction models have been successfully used in other games. So it's no surprise that a major publisher (who is supposedly hurting in the revenue department) is going to try to implement the same thing. Though the whole "across the board" nature of their statement scares me.

Not all games would benefit from such models, and as we've seen, poorly implemented F2P/micro-transaction models can quickly become a pay-to-win scenario; which is never a good thing. Single-player games in particular don't really gel with either of these models. Though, I'm fine with paying for NEW content after the initial release. (that does not include on-disc DLC that you have to pay for. That should be illegal in my opinion)

As others have said, it COULD be reasonable if EA follows suit with Valve or Riot (League of Legends). But this being EA, I'm more inclined to believe they're going to mess it up or gouge an already sore customer base. Either way, this trend is not encouraging.

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Grand Master

TPreston

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Remember the good old days when you bought a game and installed just the game without bloatware like steam origon or uplay and weren't bombarded with online achievement messages, When a game didn't access the internet unless you wanted to play it online.

Games are getting worse and worse with this **** and as usual the pirates get a better experience than paid users without this crap.

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Grand Master

Sandor

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Valve has managed to implement this in an awesome way in TF2, can't help but think EA will mess up somehow.

In such an awesome way that, when implemented, most of the people I played TF2 with moved on to games where the focus was on the game rather than gimpy fashion parades and buying useless clutter. Quite a shame as I was involved with creating and running a gaming site at that time which, at one point, had several dedicated server boxes just for running TF2 servers. Quickly disintegrated when the focus shifted away from game development to "hat design and sale".

This is the choice for game makers - do you want to attract gamers or 12 yr olds with their parents credit cards?

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Grand Master

thealexweb

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In such an awesome way that, when implemented, most of the people I played TF2 with moved on to games where the focus was on the game rather than gimpy fashion parades and buying useless clutter. Quite a shame as I was involved with creating and running a gaming site at that time which, at one point, had several dedicated server boxes just for running TF2 servers. Quickly disintegrated when the focus shifted away from game development to "hat design and sale".

This is the choice for game makers - do you want to attract gamers or 12 yr olds with their parents credit cards?

Well thats your experience, before I only knew three people that occasionally played TF2. Now I know about 10 who play it regularly. Also the still make new game modes so development is continuing :p

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Grand Master

LaP

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The F2P and micro-transaction models have been successfully used in other games.

Yeah f2p + online + microtransaction works well.

But i dunno about Pay 60$ and then pay again for the complete offline product.

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JaredFrost

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Aslong as they start this after simcity ill be okay

Sorry to inform you, if you purchase the new SimCity, you're supporting exactly that and they'll steam right ahead with all future games, thanks in part to your contribution.

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Jazirian

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I don't entirely see what you mean - microtransactions just mean you pay for items that would normally take you a lot longer to get.

The best example that I can think of on the spot would be in an RPG, where you could either grind for ages to acquire enough money to buy a Level 30 shield, or alternatively you can just pay ?1.99 and get it straight away and make the game a bit easier for you.

...and that's fine. Almost. The problem is when the company then decides to make that grind just a little worse to increase the number of microtransactions, then they tweak it a little more and some more.

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