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Microtransactions will not be used in all of EA’s future games, the publisher’s chief financial officer has said.
As reported by Polygon, speaking at the Wedbush Technology Conference, Blake Jorgensen clarified comments made last week that suggested EA would use microtransactions in all of its future games, by stating that this was not actually the case.
He further clarified the core of the microtransactions business would be in the mobile space, rather than other platforms such as console.
"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 said.
"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."
During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference last week, Jorgensen had been quoted as stating the business model would be adapted to all of the publisher’s future titles and become a much bigger part of the EA business.
"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," he said.
The EA exec also discussed how the publisher was working on backend technology to further take advantage of the business model, and that is was bringing the service in-house.
"If you’re doing microtransactions and you’re processing credit cards for every one of those microtransactions you’ll get eaten alive," he said.
"And so Rajat’s team has built an amazing backend to manage that and manage that much more profitably. We’ve outsourced a lot of that stuff historically; we’re bringing that all in-house now."
