When Ultimate Team was but one part of MMOexp FIFA

EA has had major success with evolving live-service games. Apex Legends has remained consistently popular through episodic roll-outs, as have several other titles at different studios FC 24 Coins. EA has been burned before though, through Anthem, while sports titles have traditionally seen a great deal of success through yearly launches.

It a risk, but if EA is building its entire gameplay and marketing around MMOexp FIFA Ultimate Team, we need to start asking questions about this approach. When Ultimate Team was but one part of MMOexp FIFA, a new game every year made sense, or at least as much as it could for a sports title where the gameplay improvements are doomed to be minor.

Yearly launches give you a chance to start your Career Mode over, and meant squads, kits, and leagues could be updated year on year. These days, we get squad updates every ten minutes, and most games have patches that are far less involved than a kit update.

Having MMOexp FIFA, or whatever the name is, be a live-service game also provides a lot of opportunity. From a player perspective, it only seems ethical to not make over a billion off them in fake cards each year, only to then rip all the cards up and tell them to start again, but even away from that, it also more efficient.

Because EA currently needs to convince people to buy a new game each year, it needs to spend a lot of time and money on gameplay improvements - HyperMotion2 is this year addition. But these arent often worth the development time and costs, and with a live-service game cheap Fut 24 Coins, more time could be spent on reacting to individual issues, fine-tuning gameplay, rolling out and developing new modes, and generally rounding the game out a little.