Electronic Arts started to follow Ubisoft with more open world games… and we may just know why the publisher decided to follow this trend.

After Visceral was closed, we learned that the Ragtag codenamed Star Wars game is going to be turned into an open world, multiplayer game by EA Montreal instead of being an offline, single player, story-driven project. Manveer Heir, who worked on Mass Effect 3’s and Mass Effect Andromeda’s multiplayer, revealed why the change happened:

„They are pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetize them better. Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is 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?”

He also touched the subject of game budgets, which can often reach more than one hundred million dollars. It doesn’t leave much space for a smaller budget, offline/single player games because – quoting Heir – „publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don’t care about what the players want; they care about what the players will pay for.”

As an example, he brought up the microtransactions in Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer, which ended up generating so much revenue for Electronic Arts that the system was used in Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda, too. He also added that he saw someone spend no less than fifteen thousand dollars on Mass Effect multiplayer cards…

As usual, money talks…

Source: Eurogamer