Electronic Arts earlier this week made a statement that all future games would come with built-in microtransactions which the entire gaming industry took as being PC and console games. It’s not a far leap to come to that conclusion after EA recently included optional microtransactions in their new Dead Space 3 game. Well EA has come out to clarify their previous statement to calm all of the console and PC gamers out there. Unfortunately, it’ll probably anger all the mobile gamers instead.
What Electronic Arts CFO Blake J. Jorgensen actually meant with his original statement is that all future mobile games would come with built-in microtransactions players can optionally take advantage of should they want to do so. The original statement made was “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way” so it is easy to see where the confusion came from, especially with Dead Space 3 containing said microtransactions, something that was basically blamed on mobile gamers anyways.
EA’s new statement clarifies the confusion:
All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of our mobile games are going to a world where its play-for-free. We were discussing back-office capabilities inside the company, and how we’ve built a platform to really be able to bring in-house our ability to do credit card processing, digital downloads, and manage a world in which there are more and more microtransactions as part of what we offer. – Electronic Arts CFO Blake J. Jorgensen
Electronic Arts CFO Blake J. Jorgensen goes on to further explain that some of these microtransactions won’t just be for goods in-game but for products that should be considered as services as well:
You’re going to see extensions off of products like Battlefield Premium which are simply not microtransactions. They are premium services, or additional add-on products or download that we’re doing… it is essentially an extension of the gameplay that allows someone to take a game that they might have played for a thousand hours, and play it for two thousand hours. We want to ensure that consumers are getting value. The real core microtransaction component of our business is in the mobile part of the business, which is the free-to-play business. – Electronic Arts CFO Blake J. Jorgensen
So you can expect all of the future games coming from Electronic Arts onto Android, or any other mobile platform for that matter, to contain some sort of IAP. This should also mean more free games from EA although we will have to wait and see if that actually happens.
Website Referenced: Gamasutra
