Good news, video game fans, we’ve moved into the future! The future is a place where from now on every video game that EA releases will include ways for the player to pay money to improve their gaming experience. We recently saw this work with a massive success in Dead Space 3 where the series’ pervasive sense of scarcity in ammunition was removed to favour a system where players could continually pay to make their weapons better, shifting the focus from a survival horror experience to one that was more in line with everything else we’re playing at the moment.
According to OXM, EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference let us know that:
“We are building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way; to get to a higher level. And consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of business.”
It’s good to know that the rest of the gaming audience shares a delight in this process, one that forcefully homogenises their content in order to provide a way for audiences to pay to get ahead, making the choice to personally reduce their sense of accomplishment in progressing through a game in their own terms, but in no way conceivably affecting the experience or immersion for those who pay $60 for a premium release and just want to play something they’ve already invested money in.
This is great. It’s cool that this is where we’re at. Video Games are incredible and we should all love them forever. God Bless Video Games. There’s nothing bad about this at all.