Electronic Arts’ CFO Blake Jorgensen had a lot to say at the UBS Global Technology Conference, discussing its intent to produce an Assassin’s Creed-style game and the company’s Star Wars plans. He also discussed EA’s monetization strategy.
While EA already includes such monetization of its games like microtransaction models, subscriptions, game expansion and downloadable content, the company doesn’t want to ”nickel and dime” its customers, and won’t put the cart in front of the horse by designing monetization before designing the gameplay itself.
According to Jorgensen, ”Our game teams are all thinking through, ‘What’s the engagement model to keep the consumer, to really entertain the consumer for a long period of time? When you think about that, it’s not really the economics; the economics come afterward. There might be multiple models of ways to engage people.” In other words, player engagement is the only way for them to want to shell out more money, and a game has to be fun without any microtransactions before people will pay for it.
He did address the fact that consumers were getting tired of monetization.
”“I do think there’s a bit of consumer fatigue around feeling like they’re getting nickle and dimed all the time,” Jorgensen admitted, ”And a lot of mobile games don’t allow you to have fun unless you’ve paid for it. So we’re looking at new models of ways to try to alleviate some of that fatigue that’s going on. Some of those might come in the form of subscription-style, but some of them might simply come in different ways to play games over time so you don’t feel like you’re always getting nickel and dimed.”
Most EA products have monetization of one sort or the other, such as Season Passes, but some don’t have any at all. Need for Speed will have lifelong free downloadable content.
