Following the recent controversy regarding the closure of Visceral Games by EA, and the changing of direction made to the company's upcoming Star Wars title from a story-based, linear experience to a broader and more varied design, ex-BioWare developer Manveer Heir claims that the publisher's motives are purely financial. Talking in an new interview with Waypoint's podcast, Heir discussed the issues with EA's development strategies and why they didn't work with Mass Effect: Andromeda.
According to Heir, EA's push towards a more open-world experience in the company's games has to do with how easy those types of games can be monetized. Having a reason for players to keep returning to the world will mean that play-times will increase, and spending can increase with it.
"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?"
The issue behind this, which Heir claims was a driving point behind the failures of Mass Effect: Andromeda, is that the development budgets for each game will go above $100 million and there's no space made for the more linear, single-player games. EA and other big publishers reportedly "only care about the highest return on investment.' And while open-world titles bring in the most profit, those games are the ones that will continue.
"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."
To give us a reference on what sort of scale the ex-developer is talking about, Heir clarified that he'd seen people spending $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards alone. Since EA products began to nail the multiplayer experience, the company decided to include online game modes in titles that hadn't previously seen them, because repeatable income brings in a ton more profit than just a one-time purchase. This is certainly the case with the new Star Wars: Battlefront 2 loot box controversy, although EA assures fans that the game isn't pay-to-win.
It seems the decision to shut down Visceral was not without its flaws, however, and EA's stock saw a significant drop when the announcement was made last week. Of course, the publisher's shares are actually up an impressive 42 percent overall in 2017, something that is relatively surprising given the poor reception of Mass Effect: Andromeda earlier this year.
Source: Waypoint