EA FC 27 isn’t in trouble yet, but the warning signs are everywhere
Last week my son told me he doesn’t want EA FC 27.
That might not sound particularly important in the grand scheme of things. EA will sell millions of copies regardless, Ultimate Team will continue to make obscene amounts of money, and I’m certainly not about to do that irritating “THIS GAME IS DEAD” kind of games journalism that I hate so much.
But I still think it is a thing. You see, he was born in 2011. He is almost exactly the kind of player EA has spent years cultivating: football obsessed, grew up with FIFA, played it constantly with his mates and, eventually, started wanting Ultimate Team packs and the expensive edition every year because, obviously, “you get to play it a week early.”
And now he doesn’t want it. At all.
“Dad, I don’t want EA FC this year. We don’t need to order it. We don’t play it anymore, it’s gonna be the same again, and it’s just all about Ultimate Team.”
Excuse me?
That’s it? It’s over? You don’t want the Ultimate Edition?
“No, it’s stupid now. There’s even an Ultimate Plus version this year,” he said, laughing.
He’s onto you, EA. Maybe they all are. He’s 15, and his head is done in with the corporate.
To explain why that set off alarm bells in my head, though, I also need to tell you about Adam.
Don’t be Adam
I used to work with a guy. Let’s call him Adam, because that was his name and he might read this and laugh.
Adam was obsessed with FIFA and he was very good at it. Not pro level, but comfortably better than anybody you would normally end up playing against.
Every so often at the end of a working day he would wearily tell us that he wasn’t looking forward to going home because he had maybe 10 or 20 matches of FIFA to play that night to keep his rank up.
Just think about that for a second.
He wasn’t looking forward to playing his favourite game. He had to play it.- Remember when gaming was supposed to be about fun and entertainment?
There was a point in football gaming history where the game itself mattered. Sure, it might not have looked like “real football,” but you played because having your mates around and sticking six past them was funny. Sensible Soccer was the peak of entertainment. We used to have a tournament in “work” every Friday afternoon.
Even early FIFA games tried to capture the fun. That gradually began changing as Ultimate Team became more important to EA’s business empire. The annual game was still there, obviously. Career Mode was still there. We even got limited story modes such as The Journey.
But increasingly everything seemed designed to funnel players towards the bit that kept them coming back, spending money and worrying about falling behind.
Adam was already there.
Once you are deeply embedded in that Ultimate Team ecosystem, the claws are in. There is always another match to play, another reward to earn, another pack to open, another team to improve.
The fear of not playing, of losing your position or missing out on something, starts becoming more powerful than the desire to actually play. This is addiction, and it rarely ends well. That’s scary, man.
And it makes perfect financial sense from EA’s perspective. The money generated from microtransactions and live-service spending across its games is enormous compared with simply selling somebody a copy of the game once a year.
Adam contributes to that economy, so Adam needs to be encouraged to keep coming back.
You could see in his face that he didn’t want to play those matches anymore. It wasn’t even the “good” kind of addiction where somebody is completely absorbed in something they love and are at least getting something out of it. it had become a chore to simply keep going but he actually couldn’t let go.
FIFA had become his gaming sweatshop.
Soon after, we started getting Ultimate versions of the game that would let you play a week early. This, across gaming, is sold as early access, where you get to play everybody else before the release date. No, it’s not. That’s just marketing. The game releases on the day people can play it. If you then shut people out from playing it because they haven’t given you enough money, it’s still been released. Stop that.
But it works.
So, in order to get a head start on the normies, the addicted get it a week early and get to work, playing their matches, doing their thing. Going to bed and getting up to go back on the hamster wheel the next day.
You can see this is madness right? These aren’t pro players, they are regular gamers. Or they were.
Then FIFA came into my house too
Adam was a friend and colleague, so at the time it was funny.
We’d make jokes about how he was a massive virgin who never went outside, he’d wearily tell us to piss off, and meanwhile the Earth continued to orbit the Sun.
Then I had a kid doing exactly the same thing.
My son probably started properly getting into FIFA around 2019 or 2020. Within a year or so, after playing constantly with his friends whenever he was allowed, the requests started.
Could he get some Ultimate Team points? Could he have some packs? When the next FIFA came out, could he have the Ultimate Edition because “you get to play it a week early”?
My ears started to prick up here. I wonder what Adam’s up to?
Then one birthday his grandmother gave him a £40 Xbox gift card. I watched him burn through the lot in under five minutes.
Click. Pack. Click. Pack. Click. Pack.
Nothing particularly good came out of them. He didn’t care. He just sold the rubbish players for coins and carried on.
I asked him if he wasn’t bothered that he hadn’t got anybody decent.
“No. That’s just what happens.”
No, that was £40, kid. What the hell had I just watched?
And then the cycle started again the following year. Everything spent on the game the year before was just completely forgotten about. Nobody ever complains, or says, hang on…
Something has changed
Two years ago EA lost the FIFA licence and rebadged the series as EA Sports FC. Ultimate Team obviously stayed, as did most of the important club and league licences.
But then this year we had a World Cup and there was no proper World Cup mode in EA FC.
If you wanted the officially licensed FIFA experience, you had to play FIFA Heroes on Netflix, and hardly anybody did because it was awful. For the first time, perhaps, some of the gloss had been scratched off.
EA had spent decades making FIFA feel synonymous with football itself, and now, suddenly, FIFA and EA were two different things for the biggest football event of them all.
At the same time, there has been plenty of discussion about what people sometimes call the “FIFA generation” of football fans.
Kids aren’t necessarily interested in Brentford against Wolves on a Tuesday night in the Carabao Cup. They want Manchester City against Real Madrid. They want stars, huge clubs, big ratings and Champions League-style fixtures every week.
Football games haven’t caused that on their own, obviously, but they have helped shape how a generation consumes the sport.
They have also trained their players to expect constant success.
You can’t really suck if you play FIFA, the outcomes are generally good even if you aren’t that good at it. Have you ever played the single-player tasters like The Journey? You didn’t get cut from the team and had to get a job in Walkabout. If you kept shanking every shot over the bar, you still ended up the hero, winning the cups, playing with the stars, and getting the girl. drawing you into the ecosystem.
Which is why my son telling me he doesn’t care anymore feels more significant than when he cancelled Fortnite Crew.
My lad and his friends have been successfully converted by EA into customers. They got the Ultimate Editions. They kept opening the packs year in year out. They were a spreadsheet success story.
And now, aged 15, he looks at EA FC 27 and thinks it’s stupid. That should worry somebody, but it won’t.
EA picked an interesting time to push harder
The recent fallout and pathetic backpedalling over the shadow-dropped microtransactions into the single player version of College Football 27 has probably told us everything we need to know about how this is going to end.
Mass refunds, influencers throwing their toys out of the pram and a mealy-mouthed apology. We have seen it all before, but there are other things at play in the wider industry with people growing more and more fed up of being bled dry with game and hardware prices. With the deal to the Saudi-backed conglomerate having finally gone through, EA has gone private and takes on some, wait for it, $18 billion in debt, which is just the $1.8 billion a year in interest according to Jason Schreier.
Schreier goes on to say: “EA’s annual Ebitda is around $1.5 billion, which should be enough to service the interest payments.
But the publisher has told debt investors that it will cut $700 million in annual costs including $170 million in “organizational efficiencies,” per Bloomberg. In other words: mass layoffs.”
Nobody is shocked, but if the general public is finally reaching the end of their tether this would be spectacularly bad timing. If new consoles are so expensive going forward they start to sell less and less, games sales will go down.
If people simultaneously stop buying the same old game year in year out, games sales will go obviously down.
What won’t go down is that debt.
Interesting times ahead my friends, interesting times indeed.
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