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EA Building Microtransactions Into All of Its Future Games
An anonymous reader writes "Develop reports on comments from Blake Jorgensen, Electronic Arts' Chief Financial Officer, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference. As you may have guessed from the name of the conference, the business aspect of EA was the topic. Jorgensen said, 'The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is microtransactions within games. ... 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.' This is particularly distressing given EA's recent implementation of microtransations in Dead Space 3, where you can spend money to improve your weaponry."
The answer to your rhetorical question is "because EA gives you a cut of the sales".
Just look at Valve's current efforts with "Steam Workshop", where the community is allowed to build items for their more popular titles.
They recently disclosed that at least one of the people who contributes content has already made over $500,000 from sales of their items.
EA already has added "gambling" to SWTOR.
You can spend REAL money to buy these crate things that contain RANDOM items of questionable in-game value. Now, you can't exactly turn that back into real world money, but you're essentially falling into the Pokemon style situation where you could end up paying hundreds of dollars to get that one "card" you really wanted. Another guy could get it on the first "pack" bought.
I played Diablo 1 and D2 and thoroughly enjoyed them. D3 came out and in the beginning I enjoyed it. Then I realized that to get better gear I had to visit the Gold Auction house.. so I would put my stuff up for auction and try to buy new/better stuff. 99% of the time I couldn't move my old stuff b/c there was always something better in the auction house....
Which would be great if I had tons of gold... so how do you get more gold?
1. Grind grind grind... kill the same dungeons over and over again. Pickup the gold, and whatever trash you find, sell it to the merchant for more gold. Grind grind grind.
2. Win the lottery. Something drops that actually worth something in the gold auction house.
3. Buy gold with real money.
The problem here is that gold in itself in D3 is basically worthless. I can recall when certain items were 10million gold. Then a few weeks later those same items were 40million gold. Are they more rare? Nope. There's just more gold available in game. So let's say you sold that item for 10million because you couldn't use it (wrong class). And you go on vacation for a few weeks. An equivalent item for your class would now be 40million gold. So now how do you get 30 million more gold?
Grind grind grind or hope something drops for you or say f-ck it and pay Blizzard a few bucks to get 40 million gold. Knowing that in a month's time that instead of you paying $5 to get the item, you'd need to pay $10 because you'd need 2x as much gold.
This is why I stopped playing D3. I realized in order to continue to advance I was playing to get gold for the auction house.
I uninstalled back in October and haven't gone back since.