EA continues to make business moves that inspire less than a trusting atmosphere for gamers and fans of the series that the publisher is affiliated with. Mass Effect: Andromeda is the most recent series where a game that was set up for success seemed to fall throw the cracks because of mishandling on the business end of how the developmental side worked. Though it was a vast open-world setting, and the franchise is highly praised world-wide, the focus wasn’t on the right things and the funding just didn’t stand a chance.
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Now most recently, the news of the highly anticipated linear story-driven Star Wars game headed by Visceral Games being shut down and handed over to EA resparked the “why” question in the community when many gamers just want a solid story. With all of the moves to make things more multiplayer friendly and open without substance, one ex-BioWare developer returns to shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes.
“I’ve seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards.”
Controversial, self-proclaimed “hot head” Manveerย Heir sat down in a recent interview and talked about the less than desirable reason for the big push in multiplayer and their rendition of open-world. One huge reason? Simply stated: “I’ve seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayerย cards.” But it goes deeper than that.ย
This is what Hier had to say when he sat down for an interview with Waypoint’s podcast:
“It’s definitely a thing inside of EA, they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise 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?”
The immediate problem:
“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.”
The Mass Effect franchise is only of the most recent examples of the hand-in-hand opportunity that EA is seizing, but Dragon Age – though beloved – had its fair share of the MP infiltration:ย
“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.”
Because of controversy surrounding Heir and his public correspondence, he resigned from the company – but the outspoken devย doesn’t let that stop him from speaking out on what he feels needs to change with his previous employers. To hear more of the interview, check out the podcast right here.
