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.
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.
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
