personally i don't care much for the players who are already taking millions out of the game.
I don't care much for EA sports either or the lawyers who will be making a mint from the litigation. Going forward, i expect football games to go back to what PES was with fake names and fake teams if this is successful.
On the whole, i hope the players lose
It's not the base game which is the issue here, it's the Ultimate Team which
a.) Is outlawed in both Holland and Belgium, as loot boxes fall foul of their gambling regulations
b.) Raked in $716m for EA from FIFA 20. Not the base game, the microtransactions (and Madden made a similar figure last year) while the base game netted them $30.4m. No, that is not a typo
And that's the point: most other games with loot boxes either sell cosmetic items (i.e. Overwatch, Fortshite, Call of Duty) which is already problematic but we'll leave that for another time, or if they have the likeness of real people they pay through the nose for the license (i.e Star Wars Battlefront II, and boy did they go overboard with the loot boxes to claw that money back...) but that's not what is happening here, as FIFA and Madden are selling the likenesses of real people and they're hardly along, as 2K do the same thing with their NBA franchise while Konami do this with PES's myClub - and it has to be said that Diego Maradona slapped Konami with a lawsuit a few years ago due to their selling his likeness in PES17 without asking, just as EA had to drop the NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball franchises after losing in court (
here's some background on that one) meaning there is legal precedent for Zlatan et al taking action against EA
On top of that, let's be honest here: FIFA and Madden need the players, not just for the front cover as that's become a major part of engagement in the last few years, but they need the players in order for Ultimate Team to work because while you can and do see people losing their **** because they got peak Iniesta for their Ultimate Team, you won't have anywhere near that level of interest or engagement if it was some generic Spanish bloke nobody knows
And the fact that EA make twenty times more from Ultimate Team packs than they do from the game they are part of, and it's pure profit for EA as the players aren't getting a cut of that, that's not something to handwave away because without FIFA, EA lose one of their biggest cash cows
