Last week EA CFO Blake Jorgensen caused the internet to explode when he said "all" future EA games would have microtransactions built into them. Now he is expressing a change of heart.
"I made a statement in the conference along the lines of 'We'll have micro-transactions in our games'… that's really not true," he clarifies at Wednesday’s Wedbush Technology Conference in New York City, Polygon reports. "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."
Basically the semantics of his initial statement were misunderstood, according to Jorgensen. All EA games will be built with the potential for microtransactions but won’t necessarily employ the practice.
‘Real Racing 3’ released to less-than-stellar reviews, with Penny Arcade’s Ben Kuchera telling readers, “I played about 20 minutes of Real Racing 3 before the consumer-hostile monetization practices made me want to slam my iPad into the wall.” The mobile game market remains the most experimental with the free-to-play business model, though consoles are not untouched.
EA’s recent console microtransaction experiment, ‘Dead Space 3,’ fared better in critical review, averaging a 78 for the Xbox 360 version. The microtransactions in that game fell under the pick-me-up category rather than the, “give us tiny amounts of money or lose this game,” side of things. Though, despite rumors surrounding the franchise’s discontinuation due to poor sales, EA’s official word on the subject says otherwise.
