Didn’t watch the video but I’m guessing greed?
Yep. And trying to out-greed EA is wild!
I never understood why you need a new game every single year just because a few player names changed… why not just put out an online update?
Ah yes, money.
A chunk of their target audience aren’t really gamers so much as FIFA players. They don’t buy a lot of games, so they don’t mind splurging on the newest and most up to date installment of their favourite soccer sim once per year.
Greed™
It made slightly more sense back in the days, when each update also used to bring significant changes to the game engine, graphics, etc etc. But these days those changes are so incremental they’re barely noticeable, so simple yearly updates and a full refresh maybe every 4/5 years would be fine, but they figured out people don’t mind paying an AAA price tag every single year so why stop.
I’m not into sports or sports games but the classic nes and snes games getting annual roster update romhacks makes me happy
I’m privvy to some of the details from this on the EA side of things, and everything in this video is accurate, from what I know.
It was quite a bit of work for EA to strip FIFA out of everything, though. All the UX elements, of course, but they also wanted to be sure to strip FIFA from database names and entries, servers, and a whole host of other places. EA wanted to be 100% confident that there was no mention of FIFA anywhere, just to be completely in the clear from any trademark disputes.
Hearing my connection in EA talk about it reminded me of Y2K patching, lol. Going through the codebase and databases meticulously to check and double check everything.