FIFA Ultimate Team: Former executive Peter Moore defends the Loot Boxes

Peter Moore, former executive Microsoft products ed Electronic Arts, he addressed to the microphones of reporters of GamesIndustry the complex question of Loot Box, offering his point of view on the subject. He said himself against the idea of ​​equating microtransactions with gambling. In fact, taking the packages of FIFA 21 Ultimate Team, said that: “they are a bit like the card collections you found in cigarette packs in the 20s and 30s or the Lucky Bags of sweets UK. With this kind of content you always get something, it's not that if you open a package then you discover that there is nothing inside “.

Moore however stressed that “this is it my personal vision, I'm out of the video game industry and I just think there's really a lot of distance between gambling and mechanics like loot boxes. I mean, the numbers speak for themselves, they are very successful, people buy them and they know they can get gold packs or less, it's not about gambling. "

Kerry Hopkins, EA's vice president of legal and government affairs, ha recently argued the same positions, advocating the "fairly ethical" use of loot boxes by society during a selection committee for digital, culture, media and sport at the House of Commons UK in 2019. "Well, for one thing, I wouldn't call them loot boxes," he said. “So what we consider a surprise mechanism always happens. If you go to a store you will see that it sells a lot of surprise toys. This is something that people like a lot, who enjoy surprises. And so it's something that's been part of the toy world for years, whether it's Kinder Eggs or Hatchimals or LOL Surprise “.

There is no doubt that Fifa Ultimate Team is the most profitable mode of the football simulator, so much so that EA in the last year has earned about $ 1 billion, thanks to the microtransactions of the title. And you, which side are you on? Do you argue that microtransactions come close to gambling?