Because money. Of course.
Look, we all know what happened with Mass Effect: Andromeda. The sad thing is, it caused a something of a sea change at EA. As Manveer Heir mentioned in an appearance on the Waypoint podcast (part of which you can read at Eurogamer):
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 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.
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.
You can hear the entirety of his interview over at Waypoint. On the plus side, now we all know why EA decided Dragon’s Age needed multiplayer, right?
Sources: PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Waypoint
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