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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."
They will soon be building microtransactions into their microtransactions, so you can pay money while you're paying money.
Any time you can buy your way to victory is a quick way to lose any hardcore fan base, and most likely the audience that will keep playing your game after release-hype
All their games will be free now right?
Alas, poor EA! we knew thee well
$5 to unlock the start menu
Pretty soon you will be able to tell if a person is rich by the gun they have in a game. The poor will walk around with pistole's the rich will drive tanks.
As long you you didn't pay for the "retail" version (a.k.a. DVD / Blueray delivered ones), I don't see a problem. The developers has to be paid somehow, and if some people wants to pay for their games this way, no problem.
But if I pay the full retail price, I expect to be able to enjoy the game in full experience. Paying twice for the privilege of playing an already paid game is not an option for me. It shouldn't even be allowed, at first place.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
You must be a Battlefield 3 Premium Player to see this comment.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Consumers might be "tolerating" it, and many of them might be suckers who're going to buy this stuff, but I doubt there are really many gamers "enjoying and embracing" it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Cheat codes? Or you went and downloaded a "trainer"? Seriously, what the hell is this crap where I don't own the game I bought? You want to run a freemium game? Great! I'll happily support the developers for that business model. I will not however buy "half" of a game.
Blizzard does not do this. The stuff you buy from Blizzard is cosmetic, it doesn't affect gameplay.
I refuse to play games with microtrasactions. Erased my favorite game that I had paid for from my phone when the develop implemented them. This will make decisions in the future easier, EA logo = Bad.
I personally like how ps2 does this. Weapons can be purchased or cert points can be used. Most default guns are great with some certs put into them, but the other guns are more situational sidegrades. I played a month before spending a dime and didnt feel abused, now I subscribe because I decided I enjoy the game and decided I want to support it. The developers are highly accessible yet firm on decisions. I have seen a few plqyer ideas directly impact the development course of action.
Now, microtransactions in a full retail game? Fuck that. I wont buy it even to give it a chance.
"Moving forward we will balance and tune all our releases towards deliberately-engineered artificial resource scarcity. This will in turn incentivise you opening your wallet to get your game back towards a playable state.
"Please form an orderly queue at the money pit."
The stuff you buy from Blizzard is cosmetic, it doesn't affect gameplay.
I guess you haven't played Diablo 3.
EA Effectively Discouraging Me from Playing All of Its Future Games
... and this is my favorite in-app purchase on the Citadel.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
It takes a good game developer to make a micro transaction model work for a single particular game.
It takes an EA exec to force that model upon every game a publisher makes.
Five years ago I was researching in game purchases by opening a browser within the game. I saw it as a way to make purchases within a game. Personally I see micro purchases as a major negative if you need those purchases are needed to actually complete a game. If where we are headed is needing to spend even more money to complete the game I just bought I will stop buying games. Enhancements are one thing but I see greed driving the sales and the in game purchases being a part of the game.
There's no such thing as MICRO in EA's micro-transactions. They are always in the dollars (plural) range. Micro would mean, at least to me, less than $1. But no just go compare prices. Probably 95% minimum of their digital stuff sells for more than a dollar, and I've seen plenty of "items" that would buy you an ENTIRE GAME on Steam or GoG for the same price, and I don't always mean during their 75% off sales either where games are $5 or less.
The idiots out there can keep supporting this BS, but I won't. Not ever. And you really need to stop calling them micro transactions when they're anything but micro.
captcha: reproach
Because we all love getting our asses kicked by the fourteen year old with the trust fund.
The game industry is mirroring Hollywood in more ways than budgets. We have 90% of the content being released by just a few very large studios, who seem averse to anything that isn't a sequel or a remake. What really sucks is that we spent the last 20 years trying to improve the gaming experience enough to really get players immersed in the game, only to have the whole concept of immersion take a back seat to shareholder earnings.
In hindsight, it's no wonder the gaming industry has been so paranoid about piracy; I think they've purposefully been using the Hollywood model for inspiration.
You are not buying things from Blizzard, you are buying things from other players and Blizzard get's a cut of the action.
You are not buying things from other players, you are buying things from Blizzard and they give the players a cut of the action so someone plays their shitty game.
I don't think that microtransactions are an inherently bad thing, but in this case - well, it's EA, so it can ONLY be bad.
Take a look at Need For Speed World for some indication of the future.. the worst-implemented and maintained MMO that I'm aware of [noting that I know I'm not an expert on MMOs, but NFSW is truly shite].
The game is ostensibly "free to play" and centred on multiplaying racing.. but:
* As with most EA fare, the game is run almost entirely by the marketing department [I actually feel sorry for the devs, as it's evident that they're effectively bound & gagged by the marketing department]
* the devs and marketing people actually stated, "You can't buy victory," despite the fact that the best of everything are available only for real money, and the best of everything totally affect gameplay and shift all advantages easily and quickly to any fool with a credit card
* There's effectively no matchmaking most of the time, so the chances of being able to enter a public event with even remote chances of winning a round depend mostly on how much you've put into real-money-only cars that make up nearly all of the top performers
* there's no chat system for users to communicate publicly; they had to disable it >1 year ago because the devs aren't competent enough to make anything even remotely robust or secure, script-kiddies would constantly cause the game to crash for other players with simple buffer overflows
* EA obviously don't get what the "micro" in "microtransaction" is supposed to mean: all transactions are in dollars or greater; if you were to compare NFSW to any other NFS title and try to get the same gameplay out of it, it would cost thousands of dollars of your real money to even get close [and there are players who've put in thousands, insanely]
* "Exclusives" cost up to $50-75CAD for things that are only special because of a repaint by the art department [exclusive monacle, anyone?]
I could go on and on.. yeah, it's only a game, but compared to their off-the-shelf titles this "free to play" game is effectively several orders of magnitude more expensive.. which make little sense given that the real multiplayer aspects of the game are either disabled, broken, or simply not present. The game is basically, at this point, not really a multiplayer game.
This is the future of gaming, going by EA's ethics-free "screw the customer" business plan: make the client free, but bleed players dry hundreds if not thousands of times over if they want to "achieve" the same things they can by buying last year's single-player+muliplayer title down-to-$10 at any brick&mortar store.
I feel sorry for the smallish studios that EA keep buying up - the devs lose all freedom to determine the direction they want their games to go, and live under corporate policies that amount to "leave the customer completely in the dark while charging them as much as possible." The future of gaming, indeed.
I was lucky enough to be around for the early days of PC gaming. I remember when the manual actually told you to make a backup of the floppy. (for you young viewers, manuals were small booklets that used to come with games giving you tips, backstory, art..)
I guess it's good that I am nearing 40 and don't get into gaming as nearly as I used to. This stuff is just turning me off completely.
Considering the typical audience here, there are probably not a lot of you that play EA's NHL (yearly susbscription game). They have already been testing the waters for this from at least 2011 when they indroduced a mode of play called "hockey ultimate team". In this mode you build a team by using "cards". The cards actually come in foil packs that you can buy (all virtual of course). They offer a way to pay for the packs with earned in-game points or real-world money. My son plays the NHL13 version of this game and it is obvious that the system is entirely designed to get you to need to buy more packs of cards to continue paying.
As expected the good hockey players are "rares" (and i mean really rare), and you continually need to feed contract cards and injury repair cards to keep playing. The amount of points required to get the medium and larger packs are so high it is difficult if not impossible for a weaker player to ever purchase with earned points. I'm a software engineer, I see the patterns and thresholds and how they are clearly designed to maximize the need for more "cards". it is completely obvious to me; my son however is too naive to see this....as are probably many other people under the age of 20 or 30. And that is why these microtransactions are "popuar". Mom drops $20 into the kids account and he blows it on virtual garbage. (I refuse to allow my son to buy with real money)
F**k EA. F**k the industry for....well...becoming an industry with the corporate greed that comes with it.
\end-rant
I'm struggling to see why people are having a problem with this? So long as these microtransactions are 100% optional, who cares? Nobody's forcing you do buy them, and in the case of Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3, they're attainable with in-game currency.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
You just described how people can pay to overcome crappy game design. Letting people pay to skip part of your game is openly acknowledging that your game is so crappy that people will literally pay to not play it. Even if that is just part of your game, that isn't a good thing.
EA ripped off the Weapon Blueprint system from Dead Island and then made it so you could create your own custom blueprints.
That was a good thing.
Then EA decided that they couldn't "give away the farm", so made it so you could not give other players special parts only available as DLC, which NO ONE PAYS MONEY FOR -- they use Ration Seals, which are found in-game.
They also decided that any Blueprint you make that references advanced parts found in-game or DLC parts CAN NOT BE SHARED with other players, regardless of whether or not they have the part themselves.
In this greedy, short-sighted bone head move, EA crippled a much touted feature, this so called "Blue Print Sharing" to be totally useless for anyone who has spent more than a couple days playikng, because as son as you're more than half way through the game, you're building guns that use special parts -- so this feature no longer works, with no explanation to why other than a unhelpful screen that says "THIS BLUEPRINT CAN NO BE SHARED!"
I have never seen a company so blatantly throw their core product (gameplay) out the window in what can only be seen as a short-sighted cash grab.
The irony of it is that no one in their right mind would pay CASH for this DLC when you can spend a few ration seals (hell, I have over 1,000 ration seals and can't spend them fast enough) so they aren't making any more money by pulling this shit.
For what it's worth, I wrote in a request through support channels that they either uncripple this feature or remove it entirely. I doubt they wil change anything and I am rather certain they will cripple other gameplay features in future games with this BS, so I've resolved myself to never buy another EA title until I hear that they have stoppe pulling this crap.
I'm not against them making money, I'm not against micropayments. I am against crippled gameplay features for obvious and petty reasons.
As such, I no longer see EA as a game company, they are profit hounds who seek to disguise vending machines as games.
Gameplay should be first and foremost for any game company. If the game is good and the game play is not broken, I will happily buy DLC expansions to add to my enjoyment.
Diablo 3 is built around the assumption of an auction house. Whether you pay in time via the gold auction house, or in cash with the real money one, if you want to play the game to any appreciable level you WILL use that damn auction house. Drop rates in the game are abysmal to the point where you really cannot properly outfit a character with only items you acquire yourself. THAT is what ruined the game for me. I know people can argue that you are buying items from other players and not Blizzard under this arrangement, but even if you only use the gold AH or just don't participate at all, your gameplay experience is affected.
Considering the cheesy shit publishers have done to increase profits from sales with on-disc DLC, preorder bonuses, multiplayer passes and the like, none of which EA has any qualms about implementing into their games, I find it odd that it took this long for EA to come to this decision. Brings me back to when Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick openly fantasized about making every game subscription based.
Honestly though, I don't mind that EA is trying this. Publishers don't exist to bring us quality games, that's what developers try to do (some, anyway.) Publishers exist to squeeze every last penny out of IP laws that they can, and tack whatever contrived bullshit onto their games that they think they can get away with. Remember these? Publishers are more often than not just like loan sharks, only where the mafia tries to hide from the scrutiny of the DoJ, corporations can just pay them for even more invasive copyright laws. And if you dare oppose it, you're an un-American anti-capitalist who hates successful people and heartlessly steals from the efforts of hardworking programmers who pour their hearts into their work. They've practically got a free ride at this point.
No, what bothers me are the people who buy into this abusive relationship with people who sell intellectual property. Or lease, I should say, since apparently you don't even own software that you purchase. As long as there's a market that will kowtow to this sort of behavior, IP owners will keep pulling goofy shit like this. And they'll come out winning.
More than the AH, the game was just not good, and the things that made it not good (AH included) were terrible elements that seemed to have been lifted from WoW. I tried to remain skeptical (I'm weary of the internet loudly proclaiming that $sequel is officially The Worst Thing Ever and They Changed It Now It's Ruined), but after seeing it in action, the game really isn't good.
Taxes?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
Blizzard has in fact proved - with the most popular MMO in history
Interesting. I didn't know Blizzard wrote Runescape.
People play for different reasons. I guess it's safe to say we all play for enjoyment.
Much of my enjoyment comes from the "I did it!" feeling at the end. I saved the world. I beat that boss. It took me long hours, it almost made me throw that controller against the wall in frustration, but finally, finally, FINALLY, I did it. Or after long hours of playing finally the epic item that I wanted so much is finally mine. And while I'm not much into bragging usually, it gives me a little bit of satisfaction to tell myself that I did something that probably not many actually have accomplished. How many didn't make it past that half-time boss that was so hard? How many didn't have the stamina to sit through all those hordes and didn't have the patience to wait for the right time for the ambush?
When I now can get the same by forking over some cash, I don't want it anymore. First of all, it's not mine. What did I do for it? Spent a minute at work? Erh... yeah, that's great. Woo-hoo me. I now have the awesome sword of slaying because I convinced a customer that his backup plan is flawed. The whole work-reward relationship is destroyed. And this in turn doesn't give me satisfaction.
On the other hand, because I can already hear those replies, "but you needn't buy it", on your fingertips: No, but not buying it would be incredibly inefficient. It would bother me that I spend 5 hours to reach a goal when I could have gotten the same for 5 bucks.
Well, that's me, and who am I to tell an EA exec what the people playing his games want, I'm sure he has done some really deep market research to come up with that conclusion. And if he really believes it himself, I have a very nice bridge with a good view of San Francisco for sale.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You also described the very method which would prettymuch force people to make those micropayments: by inserting tedious, good-for-nothing and not the slightest bit amusing, hours (if not days or weeks) costing time-sinks.
So in the future what you refer to as "crappy game design" will than be "a corporate strategy", nothing more than "an incentive" to pay up, and used liberally thru-out the game ...
Oh well, more power to the people who make "trainers" and the like. Maybe the name "hacker" or "pirate" will one day evolve into something like "game cleaner". :-)
no, Blizzard lost a lot of the built in fanbase by releasing a completely linear game with almost 0 replayability.
you dont have to use the RMAH. no one is forcing it.
people do however because the game itself is so utterly boring and uninteresting after the first one or two play throughs. it is almost completely linear. tiny pieces are random, such as "will this one room basement be open on this playthrough?", but that's about it. This makes actually playing the game long enough to get that specific thing you're looking for utterly boring and mindnumbing. Diablo 1 and 2 on the other hand were almost compeltely randomly generated, EVERY TIME. This makes that quest to get something constantly different, the sense of adventuring always there. it takes far longer for boredom to set in when the maps are randomly generated.
the overbearing linearity is what doomed D3. And, given the reason D1 and D2 were so appealing and popular was largely due to that very non-linearity, I'm surprised whomever abandoned that aspect of the core game world didn't get fired.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the "talent system" was another turn off. and then they infected WoW with it too.
Even worse, all the talents, at least for the witchdoctor and marksman, might as well not even be very different. every "skill branch" seems to have "escape ability X", "AE ability X", "Single target abilty X", "Regenerate X", and so on. just the names and graphics are different.
so basically it boils to whether you want to hit the 1 key to heal, or 2, and want 3 or 4 to be your spam ability....its silly. and jsut a further reflection of the "sameness" that pervades the game, right down to the compeltely linear map design.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.