So I didn't see this posted on NeoGAF before the colapse, and I haven't actually listened to the podcast yet but in a recent episode of Waypoint Radio, ex-BioWare developer Manveer Heir came out and said:
[EA] only care about the highest return on investment. They don't actually care about what the players want, they care about what players will pay for. Those are subtly different things.
Now I don't think this is suprising to anyone. Weir didn't stop there though, continuing to go into detail about how micro-transactions affected Mass Effect 3 and possibly how EA looks at games as a whole.
You need to understand the amount of money that's at play with microtransactions, I'm not allowed to say the number but I can tell you that when Mass Effect 3 multiplayer came out, those card packs we were selling, the amount of money we made just off those card packs was so significant that's the reason Dragon Age has multiplayer, that's the reason other EA products started getting multiplayer that hadn't really had them before, because we nailed it and brought in a ton of money. It's repeatable income versus one-time income. I've seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards.

Source: Vice Waypoint via Game Debate
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