Two lawyers from Paris, Karim Morand-Lahouazi and Victor Zagury, are challenging the makers of Fifa, EA, in an attempt to show just how dangerous a Fifa Ultimate Team addiction can be. Speaking from personal experience, when your team is getting battered every game by players who are clearly, from the way they viciously taunt me over their headsets, only 13 years old, the temptation to splash out on a few gold packs to quickly upgrade your team is immense. A selection of 12 “rare gold” players (none of which might be those you need or want to improve your squad) will set you back 2,000 Fifa points – over £10 worth – with a less than 5% chance of getting one of the very best, most valuable players.

But the bone of contention lies in the aforementioned “ card packs”, that as well as being available using in-game currency can also be bought with real cash. The game itself might be simple: build a great football squad by winning online matches and gaining coins that you can use to purchase players and further improve your squad. EA has in the past said it has “no ethical conerns” over Fut packs, while in the UK, the DCMS select committee has said that it does not currently consider it gambling. It is now the subject of a legal case in France, with the claimant arguing that it has been misclassified as an online video game, when it should in fact be a form of gambling. Like Panini but much more expensive, and much more addictive. But once impressionable children become invested in collecting groups of toys or stickers that are only available via purchasing as many packs as possible until you randomly succeed in completing a set, it doesn’t take a huge leap to put you on the path of enjoying putting money down on other things of a random nature in return for a potentially big reward.Īnd so it’s proved to be the case with Fifa Ultimate Team, or Fut – a mode of the most popular football video game that involves putting together a team using virtual packs of players. Obviously getting a random toy with chocolate or a burger isn’t the same as actual gambling. All of these could be seen to be encouraging children to invest in a risk and reward form of purchasing, or at the very least priming their young minds for the joys of the “mystery box” – a very base form of gambling.

When I was growing up we had Panini stickers, Kinder Surprise toys, Happy Meals, arcade games and those toys of footy players with massive heads (that for some reason innately spoke to me on a deeply personal level).

Isnt mobile in game purchases gambling