A former BioWare employee spoke out against monetization in EA games
Ex-BioWare employee Manveer Heir (Manveer Heir) believes that the Electronic Arts publishing house, in pursuit of gaming profits, forgot about the desires and needs of gamers.
Heir shared his opinion on the Waypoint Radio podcast.
He mentioned this due to the fact that EA recently closed its Visceral Games studio and handed over its latest project on the Star Wars universe to EA Vancouver Studio for revision. EA explained this by the need to “radically change the design of the game.”
Recall that Visceral worked on an action adventure with a strong plot for a single passage. Apparently, multiplayer, open world, microtransactions and other elements will be added to the game, contributing to greater monetization of the title.
Manvir Khair believes that such a large corporation should not sacrifice singleplayer games for the sake of increasing profits.
He added that he saw the same approach when Mass Effect 3 added paid sets with random character customization options for multiplayer. Heir claims that some players spent up to $15,000 on kits.
The developer called this desire to earn “cynical”. In his opinion, the new BioWare game — the cooperative action Anthem — differs from the previous titles of the studio by focusing on multiplayer and the open world precisely because of the possibility of monetizing the project for a long time using microtransactions.
Manvir Khair worked at BioWare for 7 years, participating in the development of Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda.
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