EA bringing micro-transactions to all future games
EA has racked up a lot of criticism for the implementation of micro-transactions into Dead Space 3.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Seeking Alpha reports that EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen outlined how the company perceived micro-transactions as the next significant piece of the business.
'We're building into all 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 said. 'Consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of business.'
He also explained how in order to set up this system, EA needs to have a strong back-end system to process everything, adding that if you process credit cards for every single small payment, 'you'll get eaten alive'. The publisher is bringing all of its payment infrastructure that it had originally outsourced in house in order to establish stability.
The speech made no suggestion however that the implementation of micro-transactions would have any affect on the overall price of its games and Jorgensen added that the company will continue to support its current retail model.
'In no way do we want to see the retail channel disappear,' he added. 'We think that's an important part of the overall industry and we want to keep that a vibrant channel for us long term as well.'
Most recently, EA has experimented with a micro-transaction feature in Dead Space 3. Payments can be made to buy crafting materials that players would otherwise collect in the game world, a system which has proved unpopular with fans of the series.
EA has however seen success in micro-transaction implementation in titles including the FIFA and Battlefield series.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyI dont like the greed, so cant see me buying any of their future titles either, this pushes it too far for me, so they wont get owt in future.
Pretty much this, I would rather like to play Crysis 3 actually, but not enough to install Origin on my PC again...
If its going to become standard to do this I may have to find another hobby.
Singleplayer (which i only play) are now only typically 6 hours of gameplay only.
The gameplay we do get isnt worth(IMO) the up to £40 we have to pay already
Im sure im not the only one in this position, but i also agree pcs are becoming a poor hobby for me now.
Im fed up with the im not making much money, so they put prices up, so they make even less profit, not more as we just wont buy them, simple as.
I feel if prices went down more people would buy games, therefore overall, more profit for companies, but i feel they dont see this.
The days of firing up a hex editor to hack in unlimited ammo or heath during a single player campaign to have a laugh about with are over, as we are entering an age wherein - with some probability - this type of activity would logically have to lead to your game being locked, even potentially your license to use it taken away entirely. Why? Well how can a company support or justify such a massive back-end payment scheme such as was outlined in the article to handle microtransactions when they allow a user to do the same activity without payment? Financially it doesn't make sense to allow such behaviour in any way.
Thus I would posit that the next form of DRM we will see as pervasive within the PC gaming industry will be much the same as we witnessed with Diablo III. You want to use that license for a game you purchased? Then you'll have to be connected to the providers servers with your game constantly verifying that you've not done something which isn't explicitly allowed by the mechanics of the game.
Please note that I deeply hope the above is Chicken Little-esque scaremongering and that it never comes to pass, but given the fact that several larger publishers are moving towards both F2P and microtransaction models, it seems all too possible. For those that enjoy playing about with the back end of a game, that enjoy modifying and cheating their single player, offline experiences, days may just be numbered.
Whilst people decide to pay for it, companies will continue to do this.
Its nice to see that were all agreed on here though that it sucks.
On the plus side, in the future kids will be alot healthier, as they will be outside doing actual healthy things and not sitting infront of a screen in their spare time :)
There's no way in hell I'm paying £20 for add-ons after I've already paid for the game, as seems to be the case in Dragon Age and Mass Effect. So I haven't played them yet, and probably never will.
EA 2014: We're building into all our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level of graphical settings or to add audio, keyboard and mouse support, the ability to use a monitor, whatever it might be, he said.
Modular Gaming Experience.
I'd like to say that I'll join in that campaign but I honestly can't remember when the last time I bought an EA game was.
EA publishes way to many titles to just say you won't buy from them.
Need for speed, battlefield, any sports game, sim city, dragon age, mass effect.is just a small list of titles they own.
Actual list is about 30-40 pages worth of stuff they own and licence.
So you lot stop buying ill keep enjoying crysis 3 and the new sim city once its released.
+1
Keep in mind pirating doesn't help either, because it still shows the games are desirable, which IMO they're not. Also, the micro-transactions make pirating more difficult. The new SimCity is probably the only EA game released in years that really interests me, but I'm still happy with SC4.
dulled down first half just so u buy ****. sorry not for me.
Sims is always a funny one, but this isn't really micro-transactions. To get all the expansions on steam costs about £300!
I can understand their motivation, I mean people play some games for years and the publishers don't get any more money for it from the player than if they played it for 1 day only. But then I own DVDs for years and I wouldn't expect to pay a micro-transaction there.
Publishers like EA are less of a relevance than they were before Steam / kickstarter so it's not the disaster it could have been.
Given my attitude to the likes of the Battlefield games, when I was playing Battlefield 3 I paid for the Ultimate Unlock Pack and the Premium add on.
I also will still buy EA games because of the fact that they publish allot of the games I want to play, as has been mentioned above.
Need For Speed
Sim City
Crysis
Battlefield
And many more and whilst they may try to sell the likes of Weapon Upgrades etc it's your choice to buy them considering most of the stuff, will be available to you at some point along the line anyway by just playing the game.
We will just have to see how this pan's out, because there will be people who hate it and will refuse to buy anymore EA published games because of it and there will be others out there, who will buy the games because they have the option of paying some money on top of the price of the game to unlock stuff straight away.
As long as the price of the games in the shop drop's or they go free to play etc then the micro transaction system can work quite well.
That will never happen
Well, I simply won't buy another game from EA. However, I will say that they wouldn't have done this if a load of people hadn't been stupid and paid for this stuff in Dead Space 3.
I guess that is the sad truth about the game industry, that people reading sits like this are in the clear minority.
Very difficult to avoid EA branded games entirely like some people are suggesting enough i wonder if they forget how many titles EA has made and released in just the last year alone.
Micro transactions has been in fifa13 since its launch you can either farm matches for players or buy packs for real life cash for players in ultimate team mode. Does not make alot of difference to the game since its a single player online mode.
People have to remember not everyone has 200hrs to play bf3 to get every weapon unlocked and if they can pay £5-£10 then they are going to do that instead.
Not every game is 18-25 with unlimited free time to play a game anymore.
And EA are targeting the working crowd that will pay for some unlocks so that they dont have to play more hours than they want to and can just enjoy it.
Server i play BF3 ( private server that we pay for) on every player has purchased the weapon packs as none of us have the time to sit and farm them out, but we all earn the cash to pay for it outright without issue.
Its alot like why gold buying in wow became so popular people earning £20 an hr could work 1hr and buy 10000 gold ( which was alot at the time) or you could farm in wow for about 20 hrs to get a similar result.
I would say microtransactions would be paying a few dollars for a special camo kit, or a perk that turns the vehicle you control into a custom paint scheme vehicle.
I certainly would not want to have to pay extra for a single map, and get disconnected from a server with a message "unable to join game, you need to purchase this map from the Origin Store.
Map packs I can understand, but mainly map packs will part of the DLC expansions. Having to buy specific maps for an existing DLC would be quite annoying.
ON the whole though, I really don't mind games with microtransactions, because normally it means I can play the main multiplayer for free, and that usually does it for me
This one really amuses me. Do you really suck so back at BF3 that you think another player will beat you just because he has a few more unlocks? Did you not unlock anything in your first 50 hours of playing?
I've bought the full unlock pack. Because I'm time short and don't have the time to unlock everything. Am I a cheater?
Beyond the obvious immersion-breaking folly that is constant reminders of the real-money shop there is the fact that, should the developer so choose, it is one easy step towards making a triple-A title little more than an aesthetically pleasing gated cow clicker-alike. Think WarZ but in single player: sure you can find resources, but you'll probably die before you get to them and there is no guarantee they'll be there in the first place. Or that old gem of paying to respawn faster.
This is the problem with microtransactions in a single player game, as it is far too easy for the developer to make these transactions almost mandatory and game breaking, plus it is quite literally the player paying to cheat. You like lag, connection issues, and mandatory grinding in a single player game? By all means, support this anti-consumer business model - everybody loved Diablo III, right?
This is a frankly stupid idea. I long for the times when you used to be able to enter some arbitrary code at the main menu and get some amusing extra item, rather than having to click on DLC and buy the damn thing.
Hell, does anyone remember "-Seta Thereisacow 1337" anymore?
It could potentially be even worse, since money is involved legal issues can't be very far, so finding a way around micro transactions could very well end up getting you into the exact same trouble as pirating the game.
Unfortunately D3 would suck even without the RMAH :(
Anno 2070 is heavy on micro transactions don't see anybody complaining. Not like they are a new thing just big news because ea wants to put them in there games.
The sims 3 has about £300-£400 of microtransactions if you think it through.
Dlc been out for ages and its technically a micro transaction.
While I would like to say I'll never buy an EA game, as someone has said before they make too many big name games for me to do that. Sure it'll be a shame for EA to ruin them with micro-transactions, but I love Simcity far too much :)
I think the idea still needs a lot more time to mature. Eventually I suspect there will be some games which suck in mega bucks from people who pay a lot of money to play - fanatical sports fans, mainstream shooter/action games full of spoilt kids, and highly addictive & geeky games aimed at older audiences who have lots of money to spend on gaming. I can imagine it will cost a lot more to play those games than it does currently to just buy a game. In fact Magic The Gathering (which you can play online now) is basically a microtransaction game and 'some' people spend literally £500+ per year, on cards.
But I think there will also be more moderate and sensible games for average people who refuse to spend a lot. And I think they could end up being very successful because even if people only spend a bit, occasionally, there might be 10 million of those people playing so it adds up to more than the 'rip off' games make.
Playing it now and have spent £3, only because I really like the Ford GT and, well...it's £3. I spend more on my lunch. I think I'll get more mileage from RR3 and for less money actually...
The drop in sales (like ready meals) forces the corporate entity to change to suit the consumer, as it should always be.
That's the food business and the same can be applied to the rest of the consumer market including the games market as discussed here.
If we keep supporting this bollocks we can expect to see much more of it. (next gen consoles come to mind)
IMO "micro transactions" are a similar effect to "death by a thousand cuts" or "boiling a frog"
Creeping profits and nothing less.
Wise up or see your monthly game based costs exceed your daily earnings (net fees + cloud based gaming + micro transactions), BLASPHEMY!
It's all about the money and nothing about the game......"buy our fake gold to purchase some worthless item that will give you pleasure for 15 mins", Oh the horror!
I fell sick, time for a beer.
Don't believe me?
Here's a plan...
In the full month of August 2013, Everyone install an old game (disc based) to play offline.
Don't play online MP games or use your console, And don't purchase any new games or any micro transactions whatsoever. Discipline is the key word here.
Pass the word around on social networks and get people to make a commitment to the embargo, Anyone with a back catalog of physically boxed games should be easy to persuade.
Likewise, Anyone who is sick of this "talent-less money grabbing spin" will be equally enthusiastic.
Corporate owned "software houses" are dictated mostly by share holders who are in turn dictated by profits.
Hurt the shareholders and have a lot of control the outcome, just like they do to us with most of the shite we buy these days.
Its so simple, But so hard when it comes to the discipline.
It would be fun to try even to see if my theory is tango........This ^^^^ should make sense to me in the morning....Beer me!
I dunno, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Gearbox, Bethesda, all of these guys make 60-80% of their revenue from full games like CoD, BF3, Skyrim. 30% from DLC and expansions, esp. Gearbox with Borderlands. Maybe 10% from Microtransactions. You're not really going to put a dent in them are you.
Take a day off microtransactions and you'll bust the balls of small indies on mobile and facebook. They're the guys who make 90% of revenue from microtransactions.
As other people as said though, people does the same with TF2 and people accept it. Can't be okay for company A to do it but its wrong for company B to do the exact same thing.
If you're going to have Microtransations; Make it for extras, funny hats, strange voices, so on and so forth, don't place ways to circumvent main gameplay mechanics in as a pay to win function in games, Dead Space 3 is especially guilty of this, as you could attain all of the end-game content right at the start, and break the difficulty curve, rendering all that time spent on gameplay, level and balancing completely moot, because you come charging out of the gates with a gun that effectively just destroys the early level enemies.
It also runs the risk of making the game boring for the player, since they've just cut across a lot of the levelling and progression, giving them all the end-game equipment and no drive to experiment beyond the usual. "Oh look, it's a new thing. I wonder what Thingy-things it does."
And the reference to TF2; That game has since become Free to Play, it's supported entirely off income from people buying those silly keys and hats. Main items are also available, but the game has no defined difficulty curve nor Storyline, it's just a chaotic deathmatch.
Put it this way; Imagine starting up Skyrim and finding it a bit difficult, after a Giant has just shot you into the sky; a Popup box turns up and goes "Give me £5 and I'll make it easier!", so you fork up, and bam, you're suddenly max level on all skills. The game then becomes a push-over, you quickly bore of being about to walk around murdering everything with impunity and stop playing the game.
While it's certainly an extreme scenario above; that's the point I'm trying to make; Don't let people pay to break the game. Let them find their own ways. Difficulty settings are there for a reason, and if they want super cool extras; Put them in as hidden features. Save the micro-transactions for things that won't break gameplay design, use them for Cosmetics and other odds and ends.
The other horrifying implication, which I sincerely hope noone is silly enough to think is a good idea, is to screw balancing the game for the normal player, Assume that the average player does shell out extra for overpowered items in the early game and balance for that instead, thereby making the game somewhere between very hard and impossible for the players who don't want to have to pay to continue.
Also I want the full game to just work, I do not expect a patch to be released just 6 days after launch! I am looking at you Crysis3!!
I only paid £20 for premium but the hours i've put in would still make full price exceptional value.
However, if microtransactions were introduced for, say, individual OP weapons that would be a different unacceptable development.
Unlike hookers.
That said, microtransactions that modify the game diffculty are hard to justify.