Belgium starts criminal investigation against EA over FIFA loot boxes, Gaming Commission looking to sue

[Bofferbrauer2]

Ka-pi96 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Look what I posted before. it's 5 times bigger now and the main source of income of EA. They are at a point with Fifa that could give all their other games away for free and still make a hefty profit simply through UT. Fifa's revenue generation January through August lies at 5.15 Billion Dollar, with at least 4 Billion out of them must have been through UT.

The problem with UT is that they're not only selling power (aka Pay to Win), but gambling for it and getting away with it until now. You literally need hundreds of Packs to get at least a halfway decent team, and since the mode is competitive you either shut up and spend your money or leave out the meat of the game. That's Fifa nowadays, sadly.

Really, I wish some Indie devs would have the guts to make some sport sims, too, even without the licenses. Just add an extensive editor and Mod support so one can add the players, stadiums and all other infos yourself.

Had a quick look through but I didn't see any sources that you posted before.

Although I find it incredibly hard to believe that FUT has gone from $800m a year to $4b in just 7 months (not including either release month, or christmas either) over the last 2 years. Especially without a source...

@bold that's simply false. I personally had a pretty awesome team in FUT 18 without spending any real money at all (I had an HK version of the game and packs are region locked, so couldn't have bought any even if I wanted to).

Oh, and some indies do make sport sims. I don't know of any football ones, but all the rugby games released in the last few years (decade probably) have been indie games. They've also been pretty bad, like complete garbage in some cases (Rugby 15).

Here's another source, dutch this time: https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20180909_03725401

It states that loot boxes make up 67% of EA's revenue, or 3 billion Euros (about 3.6 Billion Dollar). Your 800M figure is certainly either wrong under those circumstances or way outdated. So my 5.15B that I stated before could have been the whole revenue, but considering that over two third are from Lootboxes, it's still way over 800M

@bold: That's quite probably because you can't spend money. These types of games are made excessively grindy just because it sells ways around the grind like lootboxes, premium currencies and the like. However, if you can't bring the things to get around the massive grind, better remove it as well to not alienate everybody. Since EA loves to region Lock and Region Code, I'm pretty sure they did just that by increasing probabilities of getting better players.