FIFA Ultimate Team ‘Preview Packs’ now show all content before purchase

FIFA 21 Ultimate Team players can now Preview of the specific content any card game sold in the hugely lucrative but heavily criticized EA Sports mode. The change has a few catches, but it appears to be carefully responding to long-running complaints and complaints ranging from government regulators in Europe to simple fans playing a game of microtransactions.

“Preview Packs” were introduced on Friday and are the only packs that will be sold in the FUT Shop during this year’s “Festival of FUTball”. However, it is not clear whether some or all of the packs will be sold this way afterwards. The FUTball festival started on June 11th and runs until mid-July. FIFA 22nd should start in early autumn.

How does a FIFA Ultimate Team Preview Pack work?

All packs for sale in the FUT Shop have an eye icon and a button to trigger the preview. This will expose the contents as if the player had actually bought and opened the pack.

Once the player has seen the revealed cards, he can buy the package with either FUT coins (the free game currency) or FUT points (the bonus). If you don’t like what you see, you don’t have to buy the pack. But there will now be a 24 hour wait before they can preview another package or buy another in its class. When you buy the package, this timer expires immediately.

Image: EA Vancouver / Electronic Arts via Polygon

Two points: first, when a package is previewed, it does not indicate which, if any, of the items are duplicates that are already in the player’s FUT collection (which can be quite extensive). In addition, there is no way to buy a pack with invisible contents. Players are required to preview before making their purchase decision.

In fact, they get a full view of what’s available to them for the next 24 hours, much like the daily menu items players see in games like EA’s F1 2020 or Knockout town. The only way to speed up the rotation of new items is to buy the items they saw.

Also, “Packs that are not purchased directly from the FUT Store, such as Division Rivals rewards or earned through a Target or SBC, are not preview packs,” said EA Sports, “and will continue to work as they do now . “

The preview pack applies to all six standard packs in the FUT shop as well as to the three currently available “promo packs”. The only difference to the promo packs is that their content already had a time-limited cycle. So if you preview a package that should expire in 45 minutes, you will see the next package in 45 minutes, not a day later.

The changes come after two headline-grabbing incidents that once again criticized EA’s microtransaction practices in its global bestseller. In March, EA Sports confirmed it is investigating allegations that an employee of the company was selling rare FUT items in the game. EA Sports has suspended all discretionary awards from FIFA 21

Image: EA Vancouver / Electronic Arts via Polygon

Then in April Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news published two leaked internal documents shows EA Vancouver’s thoughts and discussions about how FUT fits into the studio and the publisher’s priorities for FIFA 21. A bullet point in the document read: “FUT is the cornerstone and we’re doing everything we can to get the players there. “

CBC quoted its unnamed internal source as saying, “I don’t know why anyone in the company ever published this. It is becoming more and more difficult to defend the obviously unregulated gambling. “

Electronic Arts issued a long formal response on CBC coverage in which the editor said “We are not pushing people to spend money on our games” and that daylight saving time – which the leaked document concerns – is “a very active time” for FUT players, that requires new content that the company supports with “extensive, non-monetized rewards”.

“Nothing in the leaked document contradicts this in any way,” emphasized Electronic Arts. “It shows how we support the engagement in our game during the summer time and not spend it.” EA also reiterated: “disagree”[s] that FIFA or one of our games contain gambling. “

Still, FIFA is an annual game for $ 59.99 (now $ 69.99 on PS5 Xbox Series X), and FUT is a perpetual source of income that attracts players who have purchased this game. It is a huge sales driver and profit for the publisher. In May, analyst Daniel Ahmad stated that Electronic Arts Generated more than 1.6 billion US dollars in sales out of its Ultimate Team modes (the Madden NFL series has one too) last fiscal year, nearly tripling what the company had taken six years earlier.

Since its inception in 2009, Football Ultimate Team’s money-making power has spawned black markets and other illegal behavior, while drawing criticism of EA’s business practices and regulatory threats from European and American lawmakers.

In 2018, EA Sports began uncovering the likelihood of what kind of items players can expect to find in the game’s various types of virtual card packs. In 2020, FIFA developers launched a tool called FIFA Playtime that allows players (or their parents) to monitor and control the time and money they spend in the game. Eurogamer also noted in coverage of pack previews on Friday, The FIFA 21 Ultimate team began selling cosmetic items outside of his loot boxes Early May.