Former BioWare dev Manveer Heir has piped up on the subject of EA’s business model following the shutdown of Visceral Games and the so-called “pivot” of its in-progress Star Wars linear adventure RPG. The “pivot” has made more than one industry watcher speculate that EA feels a market-inspired mandate to scrap single-player RPGs in favor of something more persistent, more marketable, and more multiplayer. Heir says that’s not far off the mark.
“[EA is] generally pushing for more open-world games,” Heir told Waypoint over the weekend. “And the reason is you can monetize 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?”
He further argues that AAA budgets are out of control – and so is what players will pay. “I’ve seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards,” he says. “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.”
Heir, who worked on Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda, has been an outspoken critic of the lack of diversity in game development both before and after leaving EA, becoming a target for the usual suspects. Eurogamer says he’s currently building an indie studio.
