Last week, an EA statement regarding microtransactions had many gamers up in arms. The quote, grabbed from the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, seemed to imply that the company was intent on implementing microtransactions into all of its future games.
Today however, Chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen, who made the original comment, is clarifying his company's position.
"I made a statement in the conference along the lines of 'we'll have microtransactions in our games' and the community read that to mean all our games, and that's really not true," said Jorgensen, speaking at the Wedbush Technology Conference.
What Jorgensen meant was that microtransactions would be a key part of EA's mobile games, and that, "All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play-for-free."
That makes a bit more sense, but frankly, his original comment could have been a bit clearer if this was his intent all along. It also still doesn't explain away his fairly controversial remark that, "consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business."
Jorgensen also clarified EA's position towards downloadable content on its non-mobile games. He pointed towards Battlefield Premium as a way to give a title a longer life saying, "It allows someone to take a game that maybe they played for 1,000 hours and play it for 2,000 hours... We are very conscious that we don't want to make consumers feel like they're not getting value. We want to make sure consumers are getting value."
However, "The real core of the microtransaction business is within the mobile part of our business which is the free-to-play business."
That's fair enough, as most gamers seem to have issues not with microtransactions in general, but their "appearance" on top of full price $60 titles.
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