FIFA 18 Ultimate Team PS4 PlayStation 4 1

The various Ultimate Team modes in EA’s sports games now generate more income than brands like The Sims and Battlefield, so it’s no surprise to see the publisher double-down on lucrative loot boxes – despite the threat of government regulation. Both Belgium and the Netherlands recently declared the divisive “card collecting” format to be a form of gambling, but unsurprisingly the gaming giant disagrees.

“We’re going to continue pushing forward [with FIFA Ultimate Team],” EA bigwig Andrew Wilson told industry analysts during a conference call, listened to by Venture Beat. “We’re always thinking about our players. We’re always thinking about how to deliver these types of experiences in a transparent, fun, fair, and balanced way for our players – and we’ll continue to work with regulators on that.” Honestly, we reckon if the company really was listening to its players, it’d do away with them entirely.

But it’s not going to do that: the organisation is printing money right now, and it wants to protect a revenue stream that’s helping it to grow dramatically every year. “We’re working with all of the industry associations globally and with regulators in certain regions and territories,” Wilson continued. “Many of [the regulators] we’ve been working with for a long time, and they've evaluated and established that programs like FIFA Ultimate Team are not gambling.”

The executive doesn’t deem Ultimate Team to be gambling because you’re always guaranteed a certain number of cards, and they don’t hold any real-world monetary value. Of course, a quick Google search will direct you to multiple shady sites where you can trade your Ronaldo for real-world cash. “While we forbid the transfer of items and in-game currency outside of the games, we also actively seek to eliminate that where it’s going on in an illegal environment,” Wilson concluded.

So there you have it: EA’s not being deterred by government intervention, so it almost certainly doesn’t care what you write on ResetEra about loot boxes and its microtransaction models. At the end of the day, as long as it continues to rake in unfathomable sums of money from this kind of stuff, then why would it stop? The only way to change the company’s mind is by hitting it where it hurts – but far too many people enjoying spending money on Ultimate Team, so this is where we’re at.

[source venturebeat.com]