Breaking news; EA is greedy!

The less things change, the more they stay the same

There are few truths within this world that we hold as unshakable. From Earth the sun shall always rise in the east, all things that live shall eventually die and Electronic Arts are a company formed of bottom feeding parasites that the industry, nay the world, would be better off without. What strange an existence would this be if we could look at the next projects under the EA wing and think "Wow, they're really positively benefitting the AAA landscape; what role models!" T'would be a cursed world of chaos and insanity, a world where black is white and up is down. Thus I have to think this latest 'big leak' coming out of the EA handbook is nothing short of predictable. And, quite honestly, I get mad thinking about it; mad not just because it exists, I expect it to exist, I'm mad at those who are supposedly aghast by this. But I'm beating everywhere around the bush, let me get to the meat of the story for you; EA are vampires and Fifa Ultimate team is blood. (That's the high and low of it.)

In celebration of my Birthday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided to run a story leaked from 'a gaming insider' regarding the wholly predictable conduct of the worst games company in America. (Towards consumers, that is. In other areas they, unfortunately, have competition) This report contained excerpts of a 54 page document coming out of the company's sports division in British Colombia. (Thems a lot of pages to confirm things that everyone already knew. Kinda overkilling the topic a bit.) These documents, which are apparently from slides in an internal presentation, detail exactly what EA's painfully contrived evil plans are, and demonstrate why people should, for the love of everything holy, stop rewarding games companies for literally milking money out of you! But none of it matters, nothing will change, sports games fans don't know how to read anyway.

Now before we go any further I'm going to insult some of your intelligences by explaining what Fifa Ultimate Team is. I apologise if you've got this ingrained into your grey matter by this point but I feel that, given it's importance to this topic, it's worth going over. Fifa Ultimate Team is the flagship game mode in all Fifa games that makes EA their billions every year. It's a digitised version of fantasy football, projected onto online competitive matches and fuelled by an economy ruled over and exploited by EA. Players of FUT get to form their football teams with any player they can get their hands on, and have to test that mettle against other players who are in the same grind. Fair enough and a sensible system for an online infrastructure, the trick comes in the way these players are earned. Loot boxes, my friend. Gamers buy hundreds of randomised boxes littered with terrible players in the hopes of beating the odds and getting someone useful for their team and all too often earning nothing because they're literally battling -1% odds, turning a supposedly skill-based competitive infrastructure into a game of who has the most spare funds to keep pulling the handle on the one armed bandit. (Oh, but you can't make the gambling comparison because then the sports games fans throw a tantrum and start rolling around on the floor.)

EA know that the Fifa Ultimate team is the life blood of their games, which is why year after year they release low effort touch-ups upon the actual game being sold so that all the attention and time can go into Fifa Ultimate team and discovering new ways to feed players into that money grinding machine. "Oh but you're just exagger-" No I'm not! This report has literal proof! One of the slides literally labels FUT as 'the cornerstone of the game' with a bullet point handily stating "We are doing everything we can to drive players there." (This is pretty much 'sitting in a pool of the victims blood when the cops arrive, brandishing the blade that killed them and saying "I'm glad I killed the b******") They've even detailed methods; when talking about 'content teasers' in another slide they apparently detailed that this tactic should "Drive excitement and funnel players towards FUT from other modes." Why, you ask? Because FUT is where players can be at the mercy of EA's percentage algorithms. A place where players can chew up thousands of lootboxes for a couple of decent players if they're lucky. And once players are hooked like it's a drug, all the team has to do is wait a year until the next Fifa comes out because guess what- FUT purchases aren't carried over to the next game. (And you thought Pokemon's Dexit was bad)

So far so obvious, though. EA has maintained a reputation as some of the worst people on the development scene for a reason, my only question is why this 'leaker' bothered to drop any of this stuff anyway. In his anonymous words, "We can't really do anything about it because at the end of the day (EA) is just trying to make money and satisfy investors." A point to which I'm going to call just a little bull. EA can make a profit and keep the money people happy just fine without literally trying to hook it's consumer base up to a money IV drip and suck them till their dry. That takes a special level of disdain for the people who dare to support your company by buying your games, and sort of reveals how anyone working with or for EA is, whether they want to be or not, disrespecting consumers of games in the industry over. That's sort of why I have trouble taking this guy seriously, as he bemoans practises that EA have been famous for during the better part of last decade. "Yeah, everyone knows that EA is out for our wallets, duh; where have you been?" 

This is the leakers 'justification' however, the excuse that they've used to be able to sleep at night until today. "For years... they've been acting with a layer of plausible deniability. Yet in their internal documents, they're saying right, 'This is our goal. We want people driven to the card pack mode.'"

 And here lies the reason I hate people like this. Yes, I'm talking about how the leaker disgusts me just as much EA does. 'Plausible deniability' is your excuse for going along with this for years? A pathetically open secret for how EA keeps its Scrooge Mc.Duck money vault full has finally been spelled out in broad terms and now the spell is broken and you're starting to realise your bosses are jerks? No way, you've know for years exactly who EA are but you've persisted under their umbrella because the money you make is good or because it's positive for your career. Now there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but that is a situation where he put personal gain over morals and ethics. I would do the same in his shoes, no doubt, but I wouldn't lie about it and play the helpless rube duped into feeding the machine. Own your sins, don't hide from them; least you become too small to surmount them.

But there's another addendum to this little story, a response from EA of all people. What's that? The dragon has climbed down from it's bed of hoards in order to decree a defence? Oh, this aught to be just spectacular. 'kay then; what have you morons got? "We're so disappointed in a recent media report about FUT which ignored important information and context, the result being a sensationalized story with a misrepresentation of the facts." FFFFFFFFFFFFF- Forget that noise, you cretinous bottom-feeding waste-spewing creeps. You malformed gelatinous intestinal discharge too foul to remain splattered to the pigsty wall. You ignorant blockheaded elementary dropouts. You knaves, rascals; eaters of broken meats. You base, proud, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knaves; lily-livered, action-taking knave, whoresons, glass-glazing, super-serviceable finical rogues; one-trunk-inheriting slaves; ones that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I would beat into clamorous whining; if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition. No sir; I don't like them.

EA are maggots feasting on the games industry and it's customers at this point and though I distinctly remember, when I started this blog, clearing the air and announcing how I would treat them with fresh eyes; they're just renewed my disdain for them at every turn. EA demands context; so do you want context? Let's do some context. FUT made nearly 1.5 billion in sales revenue in 2020 alone, that's on the back of microtransactions in a game marketed for all ages. EA have admitted (under pressure from UK parliament) to hiring psychological experts to help design their lootboxes in order to make them cater to innate gambling tendencies and thus be more addictive, just like casino's do. EA have, in the past, marketed these lootboxes directly at children, presumably because of how much easier it is to hook a child to addiction than a fully functioning adult, through ads in toy magazines. (That correlation isn't just my supposition, by the way, that's supported by The Royal Society Publishing) And children buy these lootboxes. A study from the GamblerAware charity concluded that of the 93% of children who played games from their sample size, 40% opened lootboxes. Which means 40% were subject to the hooks designed to rewire their brains to spend more money. Those are some facts for you EA. Just a little context, for you to stew on. These people aren't artists, they're just in the business of making money; they want to hurt you, or rather your mental health, because they know that doing so makes them just that little bit richer. These are the sorts of people that run EA. So next time you ever think about giving these people the benefit of the doubt, just think of the actual gambling addicts that these people created so that they fund their multiple multi-million dollar mansions. And as it is tradition for whenever I end these blogs; DO NOT BUY THESE SPORTS GAMES.