EA: We could gouge customers a lot more but ‘we don’t’, says Gibeau

EA’s good side.

EA has plenty of opportunities to make money from customers, so much that they sometimes don’t do it in order to be fair. They discover a lot of new ways via research, but haven’t really gouged people for more money, and based on that they have tried to implement some of these methods but pulled back at the last minute due to feedback from people.

“We discover the line as we build games, and we talk to our fans, and they tell us what the line is and sometimes we cross over it and we pull back,” EA’s Gibeau said to Kotaku.

“Which we’ve done a number of times. If you walk the halls of EA’s creative teams when people are building, there literally aren’t people with knives in their teeth with bandanas on thinking of ways of how to screw the customer. They actually are starting with the notion that they want to make something awesome. They want to make an epic experience.

“We know what gouging is, and, based on what we discover in research, we don’t do a lot of things that we could. That’s something that we found is a non-starter for a lot of console fans. We haven’t done it.

“It works in Asia famously. But, in the West, that’s exactly an example of something that we just don’t do. Would we make more money? I don’t know. But, based on what I’ve heard from gamers, is if they can buy a 50-caliber sniper rifle in Battlefield 3 that unbalances the entire game – well, it’s not happening.”

I appreciate his honesty, so lay down the pitchforks people. Transparency with the media and customers is a good quality and such a revelation should not be met with vitriol.

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