Former Mass Effect designer: EA's priority is monetisation

Ever since EA shut down Visceral Games about a week ago, there's been a lot of heated discussion around the matter, and now veteran designer Manveer Heir, who has worked at Bioware on games like Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, has shared some frank opinions regarding EA on the Waypoint podcast.

"They are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better," he said. "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?"

What's more is that he says "publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment," which doesn't leave much room for smaller single-player games, and Heir says that this means "they don't actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for."

Microtransactions are obviously a part of this, and due to the success they had in Mass Effect 3, EA decided to have a similar feature in future games like Andromeda. "I've seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards," Heir explained.

Do you agree with all the opinions put forward here?

Thanks, VG247.