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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
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'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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.
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
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.
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.