EA has been under a lot of fire recently because of their desire to put microtransactions (aka in-game purchases) in their titles. What’s more, the games seem to be tailored towards these purchases, making it so that natural progression is nearly impossible without spending real-world money. Battlefront II was one of the biggest offenders, Need For Speed Payback also had progression issues. But now, another top EA game is getting under the spotlight for these purchases: FIFA 18, and fans are taking a stand to make EA change it.
Not so ironically, the game has a lot of problems outside of microtransactions. Mainly, there are a ton of bugs and glitches that are holding the game back or allowing people to cheat to get ahead. But for most fans, it’s the high costs of the “Ultimate Team” feature that’s breaking their backs. To the extent that one player went to Reddit and noted just how bad the game was, and it got a LOT of upvotes.
In that Reddit thread, the player noted that to earn enough currency to get a top player like Christiano Ronaldo, you’d have to spend hundreds of hours of natural gameplay to get it. For one player! Then, you’d have to start over to try and get the other 10 players you need for your team.
So, in “honor” of Black Friday, FIFA 18 players are staging a protest called #FixFIFA, where all purchases for the game are boycotted today. Which is a statement as EA has released a set of new cards for the game featuring legendary players.
Any way you look at it, this is a bad situation for EA. This is now the third game that’s been called out for its insanely difficult progression system as well as its microtransactions. Something needs to change, and soon.
