FIFA 21 - Is it just a money grab?

FIFA 21 is a series of many FIFA games that have been made since 1993 and it is the most popular Football game in the world with millions of players, it is has a PEGI rating of 3 meaning anyone aged 3 or older are suitable to play it. FIFA 21 came out on the 6th of October with many people paying extra to play earlier or to get extra in-game rewards. In this article I will go into detail on how EA Sports rake in such colossal sums of money and how people are tricked into thinking they must spend money.

What is FIFA 21 and how does it work?

FIFA uses real players and teams for their games and they give players different rarities and stats based on real life performances, on these cards it shows their face, their rating, their country, their club, their rarity and their stats. There are many rarities of cards in FIFA, the most common being, bronze, silver and gold, however there are also special cards like TOTW (Team Of The Week) that comes out every week at 6pm on Wednesday and EA often put on promotions that normally come out at 6pm on Friday where you can pack different types of special cards, the current promotion or promo as some call it, is named Rulebreakers where they give less usable players that you would normally see less of when playing other people better stats to increase their popularity. These special cards often cost more because they have cool designs and you have a much lower possibility of packing them. EA sorts each card into a rarity of bronze, silver or gold and they do this by giving them a rating, bronze cards are rated 64 and below, silver cards are rated 65 to 74 and gold are rated 75 and above. Then each card has stats which determine how good a card is in-game when you are playing a match. Now we move onto the packs, there are normal bronze, silver and gold packs, but you can also get promotion packs that come out with every day when a promotion is on, these packs are better than the normal gold packs and therefore cost more, you can buy these packs by using FIFA points (you have to pay real money for this) or you can buy them using FIFA coins, the in-game currency that can be obtained by playing matches, selling cards and completing an SBC (Squad Building Challenge). Completing an SBC is the best way to earn packs as they are cheaper however there is a very limited supply of SBCs and you may lose money completing them. Finally we get to the market where you can buy and sell players, first off there are two types of packs - untradeable and and tradeable - if they are tradeable you can sell them on the market and do whatever you want with them inside the game, but if they are untradeable you can’t sell them and they can only be used in your team and inside SBCs.

Is FIFA 21 a pay to win game?

Firstly, if you are pre-ordering or buying FIFA in the first month, it will cost you £60 for the standard edition and £80 for the champions edition, but if are willing to splash the cash you can pay £90 for the ultimate edition. You are paying this extra money so you can play the game earlier than the global release and you will receive in-game rewards once you log into FUT (FIFA Ultimate Team). Now we can get into the game. Once logged in you can purchase FIFA points, explained in the first paragraph. Once you have bought these points you can spend them on FIFA packs. In which there is no guarantee you will get a good card or a card that is worth many coins, never the less lots of people pay lots of money to open lots of packs because they are so desperate to get better teams. A lot of YouTubers do this because it can get lots of views on their videos and EA earn lots of money from this. Right now you might be thinking FIFA is definitely a pay to win game, but there is one last twist, you may have spent no money on the game, but you open one pack get really lucky and find yourself the proud owner of Messi, Ronaldo and Mbappe, all of these cards being some of the most expensive and best cards in the game. On the other hand you could open thousands of great packs and yet find you can’t do any better than Parejo, who will only bag you a few thousand coins, not a lot in FIFA terms. So you tell me, is FIFA 21 a pay to win?

To conclude I asked a few of my friends what they thought and from their response it was overwhelmingly thought to be pay to win and I must agree because if you spend more money there is a higher chance of packing a better player. Furthermore they all also agreed it was a money grab, especially when you realise FIFA 20 earned EA well over a billion dollars before between September and the new year.