EA’s chief financial officer and executive vice president Blake Jorgensen has gone and said something that’s made the internet pull this face. No, he didn’t bring out an idol representing Mirror’s Edge 2 only to burn it on stage over a fire made from the Dungeon Keeper trademark, he said that EA are currently building microtransactions into all their games and that “consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business”.
While you simmer on that head below the break.
Jorgensen was speaking at Morgan Stanley TechnologyConference – where EA also announced that players set off more than 24 million explosions in Battlefield 3 every 15 minutes–where he was asked how much of the publisher’s revenue came from DLC and microtransactions. Jorgensen revealed that their revenue from microtransactions is a “much bigger piece” of their digital market than vanilla game sales. Considering that EA made “$150-ish million” selling the base game digitally, the amount they’re raking in from DLC is presumably substantially bigger, then.
Microstransactions aresuch a successful money-spinner for them that they’re “building into all of [their]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”. We can already see something of EA’s microtransaction future in Dead Space 3, a game which has a microtransaction-riddled weapon crafting system.
You can read the full transcript of Jergensen’s talk courtesy of Seeking Alpha.