Fifa gamer only realised he’d spent £8,000 on Ultimate Team after forcing EA to hand over his GDPR data
A FIFA player who forced EA to send him his data was shocked to find he'd splurged £8,000 on the game's Ultimate Team mode.
Worried about the game's loot boxes and the cheating accusations levelled against it, the 32-year-old Brit – referred to only as Michael to protect his identity – told he used the EU's new privacy guidelines to get his info out of the title's developer.
He says he submitted the request through EA's customer service telephone number on May 25 (when the GDPR was enforced in Europe) and 30 days later he was sent a data dump in the form of two PDF files, each over 100 pages long.
The info spanned engagement data, Fifa 18 stats, device information and more than ten audio files (recordings of his calls to EA support). It also included details of every player Michael bought and sold over the past two years in Fifa Ultimate Team (FUT).
But it was when he saw the real world money that he'd spent on Fifa points that his jaw hit the floor: a staggering £8,000.
According to Eurogamer, it's possible that Michael spent as much as $16,000 (£12,000) on Fifa 17 and Fifa 18, but the figures that he showed them weren't entirely clear.
How does someone end up spending so much on a video game? Well, it's all down to the Fifa 17 and 18 Ultimate Team Packs, which are similar to loot boxes that give gamers random player cards that can boost their chances of winning.
The controversial practice has been slammed both here and in the US – and EA even axed loot boxes from Star Wars Battlefront 2 after a massive player backlash.
European regulators have gone so far as to allege Fifa and Overwatch, among other games, are violating laws meant to protect gamblers.
Worse still, many of these games are accessed by children with parents also warning of their pay-to-win tricks.
But EA denies all the charges.
"We don't believe that FIFA Ultimate Team or loot boxes are gambling firstly because players always receive a specified number of items in each pack, and secondly we don't provide or authorize any way to cash out or sell items or virtual currency for real money," said the firm's CEO Andrew Wilson in a recent chat with investors.
In the UK the boxes are not currently classified as gambling, but the Gambling Commission recently warned of a "growth in examples where the line between video gaming and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred."
The commission said that even where boxes didn't meet the definition of gambling, parents would "undoubtedly expect proper protections to be put in place".
Thankfully, Michael says his and his wife's "healthy disposable income" saved him, despite his two-year Fifa spending spree.
Now he says he's vowed to curtail his video game purchases.
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"If anything, the data EA has provided me has made me realize that FIFA Points are just not worth it and $10,000 will be better spent over the next two years."
What's the most you've spent on a video game? Let us know in the comments section.
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