Over a year ago, EA announced that its longstanding license agreement with football’s global governing body FIFA would be allowed to lapse, ending a run of 39 EA Sports releases bearing the name. One of the biggest franchises in gaming, certainly the biggest in sports gaming, fundamentally changing its branding. It felt like a big moment that would change forever one of the most anticipated of upcoming games of every year.
And it coincided with accumulating fatigue and frustration among the fanbase. FIFA’s annualized releases offered so little in the way of forward progress or meaningful additions for so long, that observation itself has become a cliche. Think about that: people have been saying FIFA is the same every year for so many years, and now the statement no longer even registers.
The blue sky thinker’s vision, then, is that EA Sports FC 24 might usher in some kind of seismic shakeup of the veteran football game. Historical wrongs will be righted, fan requests finally addressed, and criticisms silenced. Surely it can’t make such a song and dance about ditching the FIFA name and then look us all in the eye and release another re-heated serving of FIFA 18?
Wrong FUT-ed
EA’s 2021 investor report revealed that the company made $1.6bn from all FUT transactions (across all its sports games) between March 2020 and March 2021. That’s 29% of Electronic Arts’ total income. Lest we forget, the same Electronic Arts that releases a Sims Stuff Pack every seven minutes.
For reference, the fastest-selling Call of Duty to date, Modern Warfare II, made about $800m in its first three days. FUT packs make twice COD’s opening sales.
And this happened despite consistent and impassioned criticism from the games media, influencers, and gamers alike. We don’t always agree, but on this topic we’re resolute: FIFA wasn’t doing anywhere near enough to justify a new full–priced release each year. Nor have the other EA Sports titles with FUT components.
And that created a real problem for developers and business minds alike within EA. It had been well established year after year that they could do almost nothing to the formula and collect vast profits. That means any significant change jeopardizes that arrangement. What if they overhauled the passing and people hated it so much, they stopped buying pretend trading cards?
You can see the same mindset in Codemasters’ F1 series since EA took stewardship. Last year’s game tried to sell us a main menu screen as a major feature. Career mode is untouched in this year’s game, while the most significant addition in F1 World happens to lend itself very well to live service economics - a constantly changing roster of events you compete in using your perpetually upgraded car. It’s an enjoyable grindfest, but its purpose seems quite clear in the broader landscape of EA’s business model.
eFootball’s utter capitulation probably didn’t help assuage any fears of that nature, either. As PES made its own landmark name transition into a new brand, it boldly elected not to include any actual game in the new name’s debut release. Gone were all the bits we knew PES for - Master League, Become a Legend, a choice of more than nine teams… I’ve honestly played more substantial football games on demo discs back in the 2000s. It was a publisher’s worst possible nightmare - and the on-pitch football was still better than FIFA’s.
AAA-SOS
If the ballad of eFootball wasn’t a sure-fire recipe for absolute paralysis on FIFA’s part, the second of our aforementioned poisons really locks it in place. As you’ve noticed, triple-A development is in a bad way. Dev costs are increasing at an unsustainable rate, and it’s leading to an attritional war fought by major publishers not against each other, but against time. It’s so complex, expensive, and time-consuming to attain even marginally higher fidelity levels than we had five years ago, any good idea that makes it into production is left either hopelessly outdated by the time it’s finally released, or it has every milligram of personality wrung out of it by risk-averse financiers.
In other words: it’s exponentially more expensive to release an even fractionally better-looking FIFA, and they release a new one every year.
That forces EA’s marketers to invent words like HyperMotion, which sounds a lot more impressive and substantial than ‘slightly better animations and AI player movement’ because they need to fill the chasm of actual innovations with something.
So let’s circle back: what will be different about EA Sports FC 24?
With the two forces of crippling profitability and a wider triple-A crisis pinning it in place, probably very little. If EA reveals that it’s totally overhauling FUT for some reason, jeopardizing 30% of its parent company’s total annual revenue, then we could reasonably expect a different experience. But that seems unlikely to me.
If EA had revealed that, actually, the series was taking a year or two’s break in order to spend significantly longer in development, we could expect a different experience. It hasn’t. It’s coming in September. And again, eFootball’s collapse probably didn’t help here - Konami took a ‘year off’ of sorts to focus on its new free-to-play offering and released a season update in 2020, and look how well that turned out.
I really hope I’m wrong. I love football. I love playing it, and I love directing wayward little avatars to play it. There are millions like me, and we’ve all been cruelly deprived of a virtual destination to put this love for several years now. So I’ll be watching EA Sports FC 24’s release run-up keenly, allowing myself a modicum of hope, that something might be different this year.
EA Sports FC 24 will still carry the mantle for football and soccer games and will likely be a top sports addition to anyone's PS5 games, PC games, or Xbox Series X games library later this year when it releases on September 29 on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
