As the world and his dog begins to turn slowly against loot boxes, you might be hoping that EA would follow suit and pull some of its random loot mechanics from games, but that's wishful thinking. As part of its latest earnings report, EA claimed to earn as much as 28 percent of its revenue from one single, randomized result loot mechanic: sports games' Ultimate Team. With such a lucrative single point of easy revenue for the company, there's no way it's planning to remove it without being unilaterally forced to.
The Ultimate Team mode in EA's sporting games allows players to buy packs of players, like cards, to create a team they can then compete with online. It's the end-game of these sports titles which were traditionally more about career mode progression and local multiplayer games with friends. Ultimate Team gives you a randomized reward for your real world or in-game payment, which as we all know from loot box analysis, can hook in those vulnerable to gambling and is often presented as anything but, making it possible to grab children too.
But as we all saw with EA's stance on Star Wars: Battlefront II, it doesn't care. It's drawing an increasingly large quantity of its revenue from loot box mechanics and Ultimate Team is the jewel in that addictive crown. As PCGamesN reports, EA earned just 16 percent of its revenue from Ultimate Team in its fiscal year 2017, 21 percent in 2019, and now 28 percent in 2019.
That's far in excess of what FIFA as a game earns for EA, so EA doesn't have much financial incentive to change its ways. If anything, we expect it to double down on loot box mechanics in the years to come.
