EA Backtracks A Bit On The Whole “Microtransactions In Every Game” Thing

Between the game and all its add-ons players of EA's Mass Effect 3 could have spent hundreds of dollars.

Between the game and all its add-ons players of EA’s Mass Effect 3 could have spent hundreds of dollars.

A good part of the reason that Electronic Arts is the reigning Worst Company In America is the video game publisher’s increasing use of nickel-and-diming customers through microtransactions. The company took a lot of heat recently when the CFO declared that all its games would feature these in-game purchases for a wide range of add-ons, but now he’s is saying that’s not exactly what he meant to express.

Speaking at month’s Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference EA CFO Blake Jorgensen declared that, “The next and much bigger piece 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.”

Understandably, this caused more than a bit of backlash against a company notorious for chiseling away at customers’ bank accounts with content that some argue is not worth the money or should be included in the price of a game.

But Polygon reports that Jorgensen is now having to correct himself.

Speaking at the Wedbush Technology Conference in New York City, Jorgensen clarified what he’d said in February.

“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have micro-transactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games, and that’s really not true,” he explains. “All of our mobile games will have micro-transactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free.”

He also defended EA’s pro-microtransaction stance, saying that these purchases are not required to play a game; they merely permit the user to progress at a faster rate.

“It allows someone to take a game that maybe they played for 1,000 hours and play it for 2,000 hours,” said Jorgensen. “We are very conscious that we don’t want to make consumers feel like they’re not getting value. We want to make sure consumers are getting value.

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