EA er så sandelig kommet i lidt PR-modvind med annonceringen af Visceral Games' lukning, og den totale omlægning af deres Star Wars-spil, men dette er bare ét eksempel på firmaets metoder, der nu kritiseres heftigt af en tidligere ansat.
For nylig deltog tidligere Bioware-ansat, Manveer Heir, i en episode af Waypoint, og her kritiserede hans EA's voksende monetarisering af deres titler.
"It's definitely a thing inside of EA," he said, "they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetize them better. The words in there that were used are 'have them come back again and again'. Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is because microtransactions: buying card packs in the Mass Effect games, the multiplayer. It's the same reason we added card packs to Mass Effect 3: how do you get people to keep coming back to a thing instead of 'just' playing for 60 to 100 hours?"
Heir fortsætter, og mener at den voksende monetarisering skyldes titlernes budgetter, der kun vokser hvert år:
"The problem is that we've scaled up our budgets to $100m+ and we haven't actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can't we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don't actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for."
"You need to understand the amount of money that's at play with microtransactions. I'm not allowed to say the number but I can tell you that when Mass Effect 3 multiplayer came out, those card packs we were selling, the amount of money we made just off those card packs was so significant that's the reason Dragon Age has multiplayer, that's the reason other EA products started getting multiplayer that hadn't really had them before, because we nailed it and brought in a ton of money. It's repeatable income versus one-time income. I've seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards,"
Hvad synes du der bør gøres ved den voksende monetarisering?