Star Wars Battlefront II was the game which stirred the most vociferous action against loot boxes, but it wasn’t the first EA game to make use of the random blind purchase model. EA Sports titles - FIFA in particular - have offered similar purchases for years as part of the wildly popular Ultimate Team mode. They aren’t going away, but EA does plan a significant change for them starting this year.
Starting with this year’s EA Sports titles, EA will now disclose the odds for Ultimate Team packs. That change will affect FIFA 19 and Madden NFL 19 most obviously, and could indicate that EA plans to move toward more transparency for this monetization scheme across any future titles - though don’t expect them to drop the loot box model entirely.
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“Our model is sustainable,” EA Sports vice president and COO Daryl Holt tells . Holt says that the controversy over Battlefront II has “certainly changed us - in the way it always does in terms of anything you hear from a player or from the industry - in how we all react and adapt to it.”
The disclosure of pack odds for sports titles is one such change coming as a result of that feedback, and Holt says it’s an indication of “how we communicate and we deal with live service models and how we test things and implement feedback across all of EA.”