EA Wants Ultimate Team Like System in Non-Sports Games Too!

EA wants to make cash from micro-transactions via Ultimate Team like mode in non-sports games as well. Is there a surprise here?

Ever since Electronic Arts introduced the FIFA Ultimate Team feature followed by the same feature in other sports titles, it has been highly popular among the players. However, it is a purely sports games based feature which is why we never thought that EA would want to bring it to non-sports titles.

However, that is exactly what the company wants to do thanks to the overwhelming usage of the feature in each game that they brought it to – ever since FIFA 09 the feature has been used by 21 million gamers in FIFA alone!

The chief financial officer and executive vice president of Electronic Arts, Blake Jorgensen was recently attending the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology Conference 2016 where comparisons were drawn in the competition that Titanfall and Battlefield 1 are going to face with Call of Duty Infinite Warfare.

Jorgensen was asked that since Activision plans to go beyond just map packs, and the basic microtransactions model, what was EA planning to counter.

Interestingly, he responded by revealing that EA is actually thinking of ways to introduce an Ultimate Team like system even to titles are are not sports based. While we really have no idea how they want to pull this off, Jorgenson is right to saying that they have “the largest extra content business in the industry.”

We are thinking about how do we replicate the Ultimate Team style game play in non-sports games. And that may ultimately yield some very interesting opportunities across our franchises. We are less focused on micro-transactions and […] we want to be careful not to nickel and dime the consumer. We like the notion of how to drive deep engagement. And when we deeply engage you, you will spend money over time. And we like to think about that as the model versus simply a micro-transactions model.

Does the prospect of having an Ultimate Team like feature in other Electronic Arts games excite you?

Sarmad is our Senior Editor, and is also one of the more refined and cultured among us. He's 25, a finance major, and having the time of his life writing about videogames.