FIFA Ultimate Team – EA’s most profitable product

Ultimate Team microtransactions now make up 28% of all EA’s sales – more than FIFA itself.

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Big publishers like EA and Activision are increasingly seeing more and more of their profits come from microtransactions, rather than the sale of video games themselves – and EA’s latest financial results have revealed just how unbalanced that relationship is becoming.

As the modern-day equivalent to collecting Panini stickers, Ultimate Team in general last year accounted for a staggering 28% of the company’s net revenues.

Although EA has tried to add microtransactions to many of its games (sometimes with limited success, as exemplified by the infamous Star Wars: Battlefront II) it’s the Ultimate Team mode in its various sports games where they’ve always proven the most popular.




EA didn’t break down any of the statistics by individual games, with only a vague admission that a ‘substantial portion’ was down purely to the FIFA franchise – where Ultimate Team has always been especially popular.

The numbers are going up every year, sitting at 16% of total revenues in 2017 and 21% in 2018.

But even that 2017 figure is more than what EA make from sales of FIFA itself, with revenues from FIFA 19 accounting for only 14% of net sales last year.

At the moment, 55% of EA’s revenues come from the actual sale of games, with everything else down to microtransactions and other ‘live service’ products like EA Access.

That percentage decreases every year though, and will almost certainly reach the halfway point by the start of the next generation, becoming common place for not just EA but other major publishers as well.

Which in turn explains why EA are so keen to prevent governments from classifying loot boxes as gambling, something which the UK gambling commission grudgingly agreed with but which is certain to be a subject legal experts will return to in the future.

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