Electronic Arts acknowledged over the weekend that it is investigating a scandal in its billion-dollar FIFA Ultimate Team franchise that may involve EA employees. “We are also angry,” said the company, explaining how and why it grants rare items and promising severe action against those who abused this process.
With immediate effect, EA’s FIFA developers “have suspended all concession of discretionary content for an indefinite period”. This follows unconfirmed social media reports, collected by Eurogamer last week, that a company employee was selling FUT’s “Icon” and “Prime Icon Moments” – extremely rare and extraordinarily valuable game items – for up to $ 2,500 .
“Our initial investigation shows questionable activity involving a very small number of accounts and items,” says an Electronic Arts statement. “When our investigation is complete, we will take action against any employee who is involved in this activity. All items awarded through this illegal activity will be removed from the FUT ecosystem, and EA will permanently ban any player known to have acquired content through these means. “
Almost since its creation in 2009, FIFA Ultimate Team has had a black market for the sale and transfer of game currency, although Electronic Arts expressly prohibits this activity in terms of FUT usage. Eurogamer noted last week that this is the first allegation involving the sale of game cards, for cash, a transaction that appears to require a person to work internally, as FUT items usually change players’ hands at the auction house of the game, where anyone can bid on all the items there
EA explained its “content granting” process, whereby players are legitimately rewarded with in-game FUT items. The most common uses of this concession process are as products for technical problems in the game or accidental deletion of content by users. The company also uses the process in its testing and quality verification operations, but usually on test servers that are not exposed to the public.
A third scenario, however, involves the provision of content to “athletes, partners and employees”. “We often want to acknowledge contributions made by certain professional football players, celebrity partners or even our own employees,” wrote EA. However, items granted in this way “are always non-negotiable and can only be used by the account to which they were originally granted.”
“We don’t use this discretionary process to grant content to professional video game influencers,” said EA. EA said that such discretionary item lending is responsible for “less than 0.0006% of the player’s total items in the FIFA 21 ecosystem ”and do not affect the chances of another player finding or acquiring them normally.
Still, this program is on hold while the company examines what exactly happened here and how. “Regardless [of the investigation], we appreciate how worrying this is for all of our players and we apologize for the impact of these undue concessions within the community, ”said EA. “We also appreciate how it is extremely irritating and frustrating that this practice may have come from within EA. We are also angry. We know that the trust of our communities is difficult to earn and is based on the principles of Fair Play. (…) This is also a violation of this principle and we will not allow that to happen ”.
Electronic Arts’ FIFA Ultimate Team net revenue for the fiscal year ended spring 2020 was $ 1.49 billion. Last year, while the COVID-19 pandemic conditions pushed most of the world into and out of isolation, FIFA Ultimate Team revenue went “off the charts” – a 70% increase in the April-June quarter 2020 compared to the same quarter in 2019.
The franchise’s money-making power spawned black markets and other illicit behavior, drew criticism of EA’s business practices and regulatory threats from European and American lawmakers. In 2018, EA Sports began to reveal the probabilities of the types of items that players can expect to find in the different types of virtual card packs in the game. And last year, FIFA developers launched a tool called FIFA Playtime, which allowed players (or their parents) to monitor and control the amount of time and money they spend on the game.