Electronic Arts and microtransactions aren’t two things you really want to hear are working together, but it isn’t something that’s going to change anytime soon. The company, however, caught a bit of hell when they stated all their future games would include microtransactions and have since come back to clarify what they really meant:
“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have microtransactions in our games,’ and the community read that to be ‘all games,’ and that’s really not true,” said EA CFO Blake J. Jorgensen at the 2013 Wedbush Transformational Technology Conference.
According to Jorgensen, all of their mobile games will contain microtransactions, but only because they will all be a part of the free-to-play model. Games that appear on consoles and the PC will see no microtransactions, and will instead receive ‘extensions’. He goes on to use Battlefield Premium as an example.
“You’re going to see extensions off of products like Battlefield Premium which are simply not microtransactions,” he said.
“They are premium services, or additional add-on products or download that we’re doing… it is essentially an extension of the gameplay that allows someone to take a game that they might have played for a thousand hours, and play it for two thousand hours. We want to ensure that consumers are getting value.”