EA Exec Pulls Back On Microtransaction Statements

And so is the story of EA executive Blake Jorgensen who back in February made a claim that set the internet on fire with rage, and the vindication of amateur Profits of Doom. “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" he stated at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom Conference in reference to the rise of Microtransactions in games; and most recently the ones found within Dead Space 3. Yes, those same microtransactions that were actually quite docile in the way they were presented. I didn't partake, and I don't personally know anyone who did.

The statement alone was enough, however, and everyone -including myself- now expects to see this more and more of this in one way or another. But to put such a blatant module, one that usually resides within the realm of iOS Free-to-Play gaming, does seem especially heavy handed. And so, after the backlash hit -and probably a few management meetings- Jorgensen has come back to refine the original statement and refute some of the charges they implied.

Spealing at the Wedbush Technology Conference (executives do a lot of conference speaking gigs) Jorgensen clarified his remarks and made a distinct separation between mobil gaming microtransactions and what he called 'product extensions' for full price games.

"I made a statement along the lines of 'We'll have microtransactions in our games' and the community read that to mean all our games, and that's really not true. All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free.” he said as he raised one boot to rest upon the back of a prone slave-boy who had been set upon the stage as a human ottoman, "It allows someone to take a game that maybe they played for 1,000 hours and play it for 2,000 hours," he said. "We are very conscious that we don't want to make consumers feel like they're not getting value. We want to make sure consumers are getting value."

It's a pullback to be sure, and if EA's true intention is to offer that extended value in the form of DLC, or even using the subscription model that we saw in Battlefield 3 -a model I happily signed up for- then I'm all for it. The thing is I just don't believe it. Dead Space 3's microtransaction system seemed fairly unpopular from the outside but we don't know the actual number it produced. If people did end up shunning it the way the internet made it seem, then there's more of a possibility we won't see it again in the future. However if the pendulum swung the other way, get ready for EA to institute this model more heavily; and more brazenly.

In closing. Don't believe anything a publisher tells you.