EA Sports president Peter Moore described content acquisition in FIFA Ultimate Team as more surprise and delight than actual gambling.
In a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz, former EA Sports president Peter Moore described content acquisition in FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) as more surprise and delight than actual gambling, which is not only ridiculous, but it also ignores the truth that the game is mostly Pay-to-Win. More importantly, it is time to stop asking the people who depend on loot box revenue if their monetization structures approximate gambling, because there is an obvious conflict of interest that cannot be ignored.
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Put simply, FUT is the only game mode that counts within the FIFA series, providing the pathway for competitive players to “go pro” and compete in esports. Unfortunately, there are only a few ways to build a competitive team: grind slowly for rewards, manage the tedious in-game exchange market like a part-time stockbroker, or simply use your Visa or Mastercard to bypass those first two methods and buy FIFA Points, the premium currency used to purchase packs of randomized loot.
Moore, who has worked in several key roles at EA for years and was president of EA Sports when FUT was first introduced in 2008’s FIFA 09, gave his opinion on the controversy surrounding loot box mechanics in the video game industry. Using an incredibly outdated and inaccurate reference, Moore stated that FUT loot “goes all the way back to collecting cigarette cards in the 1920s and ’30s…The experience of opening something and not knowing what will be inside is appealing to many, hence the popularity of Ultimate Team unboxing videos.”
There are several points to discuss regarding Moore’s perception of unboxing, and all of them are problematic, because they either point to a misunderstanding of how loot box mechanics work and why they are criticized, or far worse, his argument made in bad faith that purposefully misdirects the criticisms of the monetization structure.
First, unboxing videos are not popular because of any sort of nostalgic, misaligned sense of surprise and delight, they are popular because they showcase content creators acquiring the best content in the game at a disproportionate level that most casual players will never experience. This is why the top unboxing videos, those with between 10 and 20 million views, describe unpacking Ronaldo, Messi, or other statistically improbable pulls. The odds of pulling these all-stars is ridiculously low, so of course, videos of such a rare occurrence will be enjoyable to watch.