EA Backtracking – CFO Jorgenson Issues Clarification on Micro-transactions in Games

EA CFO Blake Jorgenson appears to be backtracking to some extent on a statement he made just a week ago at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference. 

At the Wedbush Technology Conference in New York City, Jorgenson said, “I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have micro-transactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games, and that’s really not true.”  He clarified further, “All of our mobile games will have micro-transactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free.”

Jorgenson’s statement seems to contradict his original declaration from February 27, 2013, when he was quoted as saying, “The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is micro-transactions within games… 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, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.”

Jorgenson’s “clarification” seems to indicate that his words from the end of February generated a significant backlash from the community.  It doesn’t help his position, or his credibility either, when EA already has a well-deserved reputation for nickel-and-diming its customers with pay-to-play items in its products, including DLCs that some customers argue should have been included in the original release in the first place.