Ultimate Team
[8] Ultimate Team has been described as "the most important strand of the globe-spanning [EA Sports] mega-franchise" in The Athletic.
[9] Streaming matches and pack openings in Ultimate Team is popular among influencers and often watched by younger gamers.
[8] In this edition it was downloadable content only available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and similar to a mode in the previous EA Sports game UEFA Champions League 2006–2007.
[12] The features of Ultimate Team on Nintendo Switch were limited until the 2023 game EA Sports FC 24.
[19] Another way to play and earn rewards in Ultimate Team is through the Moments, though this is not considered a gaming mode and is a form of in-game skills training.
[27] Microtransactions used to purchase the packs are more lucrative than the sale of the video game, with the revenue generated from Ultimate Team "appraised at $1.6 billion in 2021".
[26] In 2022, EA reported that only 10% of packs opened in 2021 game FIFA 22 had been paid for; this raised concerns about whales, gamers who disproportionately spend on microtransactions.
[28] In 2020, NME's Jordan Oloman described the pack opening sequence as featuring "glitz and pomp" and being a "glamorous runway that is engineered to give me dopamine.
[24] The changes focused on removing the previous need to have player cards with connections in adjacent positions for chemistry to be applied.
Radio Times compared the feature to an RPG, and suggested it would be most popular among gamers who wanted to play as their favorite footballers from lower divisions in the game and could make such player cards better.
[10] In his research on the relationship of gamers to Ultimate Team, academic Jeroen Lemmens determined that "opening loot boxes generally improves [gamers'] perceived competence, autonomy and relatedness", and that the amount of money spent on loot boxes (pay-to-win) was not the best measure of achievement in the game.
[26] In 2021, Twitch streamer and YouTuber ScudzTV wrote a viral Twitter thread criticizing the in-game encouragement, and apparent need, of pay-to-win in Ultimate Team.
The thread saw many responses in agreement that it did not feel possible to have a competitive edge in the game without paying for packs, with the alternative being impossibly time-restrictive.
[21] The random nature of packs and the ability to buy them with real currency has caused them to be negatively compared to gambling "for as long as they've been around".
[39] Gamers are incentivized to continue opening more packs through intermittent reinforcement schedules – being irregularly vindicated in their behavior – due to packs providing better content irregularly, with "the mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of loot boxes [...] considered similar, if not identical, to the reward schedules that are used in the design of slot machines, making them addictive by design.
[28] In 2023, the district court of Hermagor in Austria ruled that the packs were a form of "illegal gambling" in violation of Austria's gambling laws, and that gamers should be refunded; the lawsuit had been filed by PlayStation gamers against its manufacturer, Sony, due to packs being bought on the platform-specific PlayStation Store.
[39] Advocacy groups in the United States requested in 2022 that the Federal Trade Commission investigate Ultimate Team.
