Madden and FIFA: Death by a Million Paper Cuts

Uniform updates, player progression, some roster tweaks depending on if your squad has made changes in the offseason, but EA Sports never really changes much. And why should they? They’ve got a cash cow in these two franchises that seem unstoppable no matter how much they neglect their player base. 

It all starts with the infamous Ultimate Team game modes. Ultimate Team was introduced in 2009, a fun style of gameplay that allowed you to pair your favorite players together on a team no matter the club, nationality or age of the player, simulating virtual playing cards. 

Ultimate Team allowed for truly fun combinations that let you play in any style you wanted. The problem lies in the acquisition of these players. You have to buy virtual “packs” of players to get truly top-end talent. This immediately turns the Ultimate Team game style into a pay-to-win system that rewards players for spending money because you then have better odds to acquire better players the more packs you buy. In essence, the more money you spend, the better your team will be. 

EA incentivizes getting the game early by offering FUT prizes. (via EA)

With a pay-to-win system that accounted for 21 million players in 2014, the player base has only grown as more and more people make online content catered towards this game mode for both Madden and FIFA, respectively. Videos of YouTubers opening these packs and reacting to the players in the packs have become massively popular in the gaming community, leading to the uptick in players that will continue to rise.

Another issue people have with these two game franchises is the neglect of a career mode/franchise mode. For a very long time, these two games seemed to just recycle the career/franchise mode year to year with the only differences being uniforms and roster updates. Little to no effort was made to add any aspects of real life football or soccer to connect realism to the video game. The technology on graphics has seemingly been halted with the games not looking much better than they did five years ago. 

In recent years, there have been slight attempts to upgrade the games with the Face of The Franchise mode in Madden and The Journey in FIFA. Though these additions have been nice, they are shallow and don’t allow you to be creative as you’re locked into a certain position or team for the entire “story mode”.

For franchise mode, the problems lie deeper, with seemingly the same old gameplay every year, Pre-Season, Regular Season, Post-Season, Offseason. That’s it. You sometimes are asked to answer media questions that have no impact on your team or maybe buy a stadium upgrade that makes no difference in the short or long term. 

EA has shown that it only cares about the money-making systems in the game and the repeated neglect gets old after a while and makes one question why they continue to give EA their money year after year for games that are essentially the same.

YouTubers get millions of views by playing Ultimate Team mode. (Photo via Director on YouTube)

The gameplay for both these games is at the end of the day enjoyable and immersive if you know what you’re doing. Glitches aside, there is a reason EA can get away with releasing essentially the same game every year — the core gameplay is solid and is the closest/best version of video game soccer/football we will get in the current day. 

EA’s licensing agreement with FIFA ends in 2022 so there is some hope for change in the future. The same cannot be said with the rights to the Madden name as they are under contract until 2026, making it impossible difficult for any NFL focused video game to exist during that time. With no competition in the field, EA seemingly knows that it can do the bare minimum and still retain their customers since they have nowhere else to go. 

I say death by a thousand paper cuts because there isn’t a singular reason to stop playing because the gameplay itself is still, for the most part, solid. It is everything around it that causes headaches for longtime players who may not play the Ultimate Team modes. Hopefully, EA changes its stance on their games, but sadly it doesn’t appear to be headed in that direction as EA shifts towards a “games as a service” business model in the future.

I for one have decided that FIFA 20 & Madden 20 are the last games I will spend good money on until these two franchises get rebooted/retooled in a way that rewards long time players by potentially overhauling career modes or getting rid of the pay-to-win systems entirely that make the entire game itself so off-putting.