The microtransactions and Free-To-Play markets will inevitably collapse, reckons Mark Darrah a former developer at BioWare who spent over two decades with the RPG maestros and played a key role in the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Speaking in a recent Q&A stream, Darrah believes that microtransactions and Free-To-Play are “doomed to eventually collapse,” but it sounds like they’ll be around for a while before that actually happens.
Darrah of course has a lot of experience with this sort of thing, as his years at BioWare has seen publisher EA implement microtranactions into a number of key franchises. The likes of Anthem, Dragon Age and Mass Effect have all seen this feature added as EA looked to monetise their premium games further, which has excelled with free-to-play offerings like Apex Legends.
It’s just microtransactions and free-to-play, I know they came in from mobile at first but I wouldn’t actually call them mobile monetization schemes. Again, FIFA makes a boatload of money through FIFA Ultimate Team.
I personally feel like it is doomed to eventually collapse because…I don’t have good data here, but here’s my anecdotal. The first mobile game I played that was free-to-play I think I spent $80 on it. I thought ‘I’m going to play this forever, it’s worth the money.’ And then I quit within a couple of months of spending all that money.
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Darrah joined BioWare in 1997 and announced his retirement from the company back in December 2020. At the time, he described the move as a “very difficult decision for me,” but assured fans that the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect were left in good hands and have bright futures ahead of them.
Indeed, BioWare is hard at work on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and the new Mass Effect game, the latter of which is being conceived as a single-player adventure.
[Source – Mark Darrah Q&A via TweakTown]