Last year marked a significant shift in EA’s football gaming landscape as FIFA and EA officially concluded their decade-long partnership. EA FC opted not to renew the licensing deal with FIFA, citing escalating rights costs over the years. Consequently, FIFA 23 marked the final collaboration between the two companies, and both have since parted ways. FIFA is now developing its own video game title, slated for release around 2025.
How did EA FC 24 fare?
EA FC 24 did not achieve the same sales figures as during the FIFA 23 era. Despite lower sales numbers, EA asserts having more online players compared to FIFA 23. Major sports video games typically experience increased purchases during Black Friday discounts or similar events. EA FC 24 did indeed sell more copies at discounted rates, and microtransactions through the Ultimate Team mode reached an all-time high. Presently, the game maintains a solid player base, but players express frustration with various aspects of the game. Let’s delve deeper to understand why players are encountering difficulties with EA FC 24.
Did microtransactions peak in EA FC 24 and ruin it all?
Let’s be honest about the real truth here. With regards to ultimate sports modes, EA relies on microtransactions to keep the game alive. Ultimate Team modes in all EA sports games involve microtransactions to make your team bigger and better. Players can buy promo packs based on weekly/monthly performances of various leagues. These promo packs can guarantee a minimum number of players with highly rated stats.
To get access to these packs, players would either have to buy FC coins or unlock packs with their already existing FC coins. This season, these packs were a complete bust! Players were spending upwards of $20 USD on packs only to unlock bang-average players on their accounts. This seems to be one of the most triggering aspects for FIFA. With the huge player base, getting a player that helps improve the overall club chemistry is really tough. Hence, this aspect of pay-to-win is forever being called out as one of the broken aspects of EA FC 24.
Too much testing in EA FC title updates?
Since EA FC was taking on a new project without involving FIFA, we were bound to expect some major changes in gameplay. Initially, the game was designed from an attacker’s perspective. Over months, EA has decided to nerf almost all of its major attacking features. The Driven Long Ball, which was useful in FIFA 23, was completely vaulted. During the first week of gameplay, the long ball game was at an all-time high. Players were pinging the ball from one wing to the other with ease. Unfortunately, all of that came to an end with various nerfs being attributed to almost every long ball aspect.
With the introduction of player traits, people were expecting a boost to the existing abilities of players. What happened, though, is that instead, EA decided to nerf the overall long ball passing abilities for every player over various title updates. So, instead of improving the attributes of a player, EA FC managed to just nerf the long passing ability of every other player besides the one with the trait.
Many content creators found these changes lazy and said that EA is taking away the joy from football with such nerfs. The defending AI meta has been a mess in the recent update, and players are slowly but steadily leaving the game.
