According to GamesIndustry, EA omitted the revenue data of ultimate team model with paid unpacking function in the annual report submitted with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this year. Since 2017, the profitability of this game model has been growing. At that time, the publisher EA began to publish the data of specific revenue in its annual declaration.
Since the separation of ultimate team from other real-time service businesses in fiscal 2017, its revenue has been growing every year. At that time, they brought a total profit of $775million. EA reported in fy2021 that this model generated $1.62 billion in revenue, accounting for 29% of its business.
However, in the annual report submitted by EA to the SEC, the company said that the content purchased for this model is one of its most popular online services. The company said in the document that the net income from online services, especially the net income from additional content, is very important to the company's business and will be so in the future.
In addition, in this report, EA played down a ruling of the Dutch court in 2020, which claimed that the paid unpacking mode violated the gambling law because it was fined 10million euros in the process. The ultimate team model has seen many lawsuits because it is accused of being a form of gambling. In recent years, the paid unpacking model has been subject to more and more legislative reviews. Recently, an alliance of 15 advocacy groups in the United States sent an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission yesterday, asking the regulator to investigate the ultimate team model in FIFA. The group said that "FIFA" used the phenomenon of teenagers' lack of financial knowledge and insufficient understanding of odds to set up some opaque models.
