Cliff Bleszinsky defends EA's microtransaction model

Electronic Arts seems to have angered a lot of gamers with the inclusion of microtransactions in Dead Space 3. However, Cliff Bleszinski, former designer at Epic Games, has stated in a blog post that he fully supports EA’s decision to include microtransactions in its games, and that gamers who disagree should vote with their wallets.

“The video game industry is just that,” says the post. “An industry.” He talks about how companies are free to try and derive a profit from their products in whatever way they may wish thanks to capitalism and the free market. Gamers are supposed to vote with their wallets and not buy something that they feel is wrong. To finish off his point, Bleszinski writes, “You vote with your dollars.”

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Back in February, it was revealed that EA plans to include microtransactions in all of its future games. “The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is microtransactions within games,” said EA CFO Blake Jorgensen at the time. “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be.”

This could be problematic as the company may start making games pointlessly more difficult just to push consumers towards the microtransactions. While this issue isn’t found in Dead Space 3, a cynical person could say that it’s only a matter of time before we’re forced to buy a gun in a game because unlocking it takes an impractical amount of time.

Dead Space 3 would be the first game in the series to feature a micro-transaction system. Another unlikely candidate for micro-transactions that EA managed was the multiplayer component of last year’s Mass Effect 3. The game featured micro-transactions to buy trading card-styled “booster packs” of randomised weapons, abilities and power-ups.

Dead Space 3’s microtransaction system was revealed back in January, just a few days before its release. This was a very slippery slope for EA to walk, as the game is based on surviving with the resources you can find and having these resources available at the touch of a button could potentially take away from the atmosphere of the game.

“You can buy resources with real money, but scavenger bots can also give you the currency that you can use on the marketplace,” Dead Space 3 Associate Producer Yara Khoury explained. “So you don’t have to spend [real world] dollars.”

When asked if a player could possibly just buy parts for the best weapon in the game right at the start, Khoury replied, “No you can’t!” She continued, “There are a lot of weapon parts that are only available to buy later in the game. Unless you’re playing through it again [on New Game Plus].”