The loot boxes in Fifa started out rather nicely. The 2006/07 UEFA Champions League, a separate game from FIFA 07, had almost no licensed Eastern European teams. "Shakhtar was called simply Donetsk, Dynamo Kyiv was called Kyiv, and Spartak and CSKA were called Moscow S (with Jiraszek, Beethoven and Kovacevic in the center of the pitch and Prokuryakov in offense) and Moscow S (with goalie Alyabiev, brothers Borishevsky, and Obrenovich and Walter Lopez in attack).
Ultimate Team mode also appeared. The packs looked like sets of stickers from Panini. They could not be bought for real money - only for in-game currency that was accumulated after playing matches.
Ultimate Team was immediately removed from the game and returned in 2009 as a paid addition. The rest, you know.
Now Ultimate Team is a huge part of all EA Games' earnings. Approximately 75% of players enter this mode, and half of them buy packs. Nearly $1.5 billion in revenue from loot boxes in 2020 is 28% of the company's entire revenue. Sales of the game itself bring in half as much.
After such figures, it seems that the only function of packs is endless money generation. But developers say that's not the case.
"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how to get people to spend more. Much more, we think about how to entice and keep people in the sales funnel. Because we know: if a person goes into a game, they're going to spend a lot of time in it," EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said in 2017.
The logic is clear: The more time a person spends in a game, the more chances he has to monetize his attention neatly. Online casinos use the same principle: they return a portion of losses to users in the form of a cashback to keep them in the game longer. Cashback offers are publicly available on https://twinspinca.com/cashback-bonuses/, so players can easily find great deals.
"FIFA is probably the best entertainment in the world for customers. Compare: in the U.S., you can go to the movies for $20. Buying movie tickets and popcorn is great. But you can spend $60 and play three, four, or five thousand hours a year. And if you spend a little more, you can increase your enjoyment of the game. We're just giving people what they want to get and more," Jorgensen continues.
One of the ways of engagement that keeps the user's attention is through Dynamic Difficulty Dynamics (DDA), patented by EA. The algorithms adjust to the user based on their progress, so they don't quit the game. If a player takes a long time to pass a level, he gets a pack with a higher chance of winning; if the player is strong and easily copes with the levels, he gets a worse pack.