Three years ago, during one of the most difficult times of my life, I spent everything that I had on Ultimate Team Packs. This is my story. Sadly, it is one of so many young people. You can also hear me tell it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gds5vElFd70&t=1005s

Signing this petition and sharing would mean the absolute world to me and so many others who have experienced these issues. #EndFUTGambling

FIFA Packs: My Story

Since I was a child I have loved video games. I remember waking up early on weekends and heading straight downstairs to play FIFA05 with the sound off so that I wouldn’t wake my parents. Now 21, I am fortunate to have made some of my closest friends online and to have even grown experience working in eSports with professional football clubs and organisations. I think that video games can be great for any child, and I stress this before saying that I feel compelled to tell my story of how ‘lootbox gambling’ led to one of the worst experiences of my life.

In 2009 EA Sports launched the Ultimate Team game mode in their FIFA series, and ten years later this mode alone was reported to be worth twenty eight percent of EA’s total revenue. The simplest way I can explain the concept is that it is a huge online trading card game, and users can then use these players and play with them in their teams. Better players give users an advantage when playing, and there is a virtual currency and market where these cards are traded. The game makes it’s money by selling pack randomly containing these cards.

I distinctly remember back in 2012 when I first asked my parents to use my money to buy packs, my frustrations at my Dad for commenting that the packs were ‘gambling’, before he agreed to let me spend my money. The idea to me at the time seemed ridiculous; I would only be spending about £15 pounds, and I more or less knew what I would receive in the packs, even if I understood that the chances of ‘packing’ my favourite players- the ones largely used in the game’s advertising- were low. I spent the money, opened my packs, got lucky with a couple of times but tried to be positive over the slightly underwhelming feeling that left me with the thought; ‘if I could just spend another fifteen pounds…’

Four years followed of spending more and more money on more and more packs, each time seeking that buzz that would only occasionally come. As time went on, my buying thee packs would be increasingly secretive; every few months buying a PlayStation voucher from high street shops which I would hide in my room after redeeming so that my parents wouldn’t find out how much I was spending. At the time this didn’t feel anything like sinister; my thought process with each purchase was that I loved playing the game, I had nothing else I would rather spend my money on, and that this time would be one where I got lucky, and I wouldn’t need to spend my money again- no damage done. When I was 17, I got my first debit card, and suddenly the decision to spend money on the game became instant, just a click of a button away with no need to buy the vouchers with the worry that my parents would see.

2017 was the year that changed everything in my life. I was completing my last year of A levels, with no real sense of what I wanted to do afterwards aside from an intention to attend a university somewhere. In September, my mum was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly something that you thought was something that you somehow thought would only happen to other people had happened to me at 17 years old. Everything at that time became about waiting until everything would just be a memory; waiting until the day that my mum’s treatment would be over, when I’d have finished my exams and we could all appreciate ‘normal’ life like we never knew we would. I searched for anyway to cope with a life that, even with an appreciation that every person goes through difficult times on their life, felt so unfair.

Coming home from school where only a couple of close friends knew any level of what I was dealing, the ‘buzz’ of opening packs offered me some way to escape and to forget and just to feel in some way happy. The rational sense of moderation and value of money that was meant to be saved for my future began to subside; I felt like I needed the money now, to cope, and that in years to come my future self would look back and in some way understand the decisions that I was making. I was spending thirty pounds at a time, which over the course of a few months turned into forty, which turned into fifty. By the point that my card began to block my transactions, I was throwing £80 pounds onto the game four or five times in one night, without a sense, or perhaps a willingness to accept, what this was all adding up to. A few weeks before my exams, after days of watching people open packs on Youtube whilst my parents thought I was upstairs revising, the time moment came when one evening, the money ran out. Money that my parents and grandparents had worked for, that had been given to me as savings for my future.

It is so important to me that I stress how much I recognise my responsibility in what happened. Whatever the context of the situation, of my life and of any regulations that could have prevented what happened, those decisions to spend what I spent were made by me, and they were decisions I know that I shouldn’t have made – decisions that were heart-breaking for my parents when they found out and read through the bank statements. At the same time, I also recognise that the circumstances of the situation when I made those decisions was extraordinary, and that someone reading this could maybe question therefore how my story could be applied to any arguments that regulations around video game ‘lootbox gambling’.

Looking back at what happened, one of the things that sticks out to me is how my spending was going on without any of my family knowing. We had always had family rules of no gaming after school from Monday to Thursday, and I wouldn’t at all put what happened down to a lack of parental regulation. I ask the question- what would have happened if rather than spending the money on FIFA video game packs as a way to cope, I had been spending the money on widely acknowledged addictions such as drugs or alcohol. I can only imagine that had this been the case, my family would have known. I think perhaps my willingness to accept that the packs were an addiction came with a frequent need whilst growing up to argue to my parents that I was not addicted to video games when they were concerned about the hours that I was spending, an argument that interestingly enough I stand by now. I don’t think now that I’ve ever been addicted video games. I have loved video games and when I spent the money I was playing the games as a way to cope- I was addicted to the buzz of chance when I bought packs. I agree now with what my dad had said that had so angered me when I first asked to spend my money on packs in 2012; there is no doubt in my mind that video game packs and lootboxes (a general term for in-game purchases involving chance), are a form of gambling.

In Ultimate Team, the game uses the best players it the world like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to advertise packs to people of all ages, in a game rated suitable for players 3 and above. The chances of packing the best players in the world, however, are incredibly remote. It is often estimated online that ‘packing’ Ronaldo, for example, is roughly one in tens of thousands when buying the standard packs available in the online store. The fact alone that an exact figure confirmed by EA is not out there for players to know is a part of the issue. Over the years, many content creators on Youtube were able to grow platforms by making videos spending huge amounts of money on packs which they would then make back from the advertisement revenue of those videos. Week by week, EA Sports now launch new promotions and colourful cards to push the sales of new packs to players. They have contributed to a completely distorted picture of the realities of what is ‘normal’ to spend on the game.

It is commonplace for large YouTubers and streamers to spend around ten thousand pounds on in-game purchases in the week of the annual launch of each new game in the FIFA franchise alone. You simply cannot spend money on what is essentially gambling, and gambling with such high costs and remote chances of success, in other ways if you are under 18. Betting shops, on high streets and online, are age protected, with government-enforced regulations preventing the exploitation of people with gambling addictions. The circumstances in my life when I spent thousands on video game packs were exceptional, but I think maybe that was a time when I needed protection from the lure of buying packs more than ever.

To address the argument often raised that packs are not gambling because 'the items in packs do not hold monetary value', they may not, but the value to all the people who have had their lives plagued by the lure of packs and the buzz of chance is there to see in the $1.49bn that EA made from Ultimate Team last year. 

It is promising that change is just starting to happen. In Belgium, the government completely blocked the purchase of packs in ultimate team, judging the purchases as ‘an illegal game of chance’ because the player does not know exactly what is in the packs when they buy them. In 2019 in the USA a bill to introduce regulations against the sale of lootboxes to children received bipartisan support, and the similar laws have been proposed in the UK in recent years as more people learn about the issue. Appearing before a House of Commons committee, Kerry Hopkins, vice president of legal and government affairs at EA, responded to a member of Parliament who had asked if the publisher had any “ethical qualms” about loot boxes: “If you go to a store that sells a lot of toys and you do a search for surprise toys, what you'll find is that this is something that people enjoy—they enjoy surprises…And so it's something that's been part of toys for years, whether it's Kinder Eggs or Hatchimals or LOL Surprise”.

Hearing a component of a game that led me to a point where I was told by a parent that I had ‘broken their heart’ with the money I spent, compared to kinder eggs chocolate is part of what made me compelled to seek change. I think that maybe one day, that future self might look back at what happened when I was 18, and maybe he will understand, but only if I can look back and know that I did what I could to educate, and protect other people from what happened to me. I think back to what that time was like, how I felt and what I was trying to escape from when I spent everything I had on FIFA packs, and I owe it to that 18 year old, and to all the other children that are and will go on to spend money on lootbox purchases that they will regret in years to come, to do what I can to end what is utter exploitation.

The Change We Are Seeking: 

Examples of how this issue could be addressed by the UK Government include placing 18+ restrictions upon the Ultimate Team pack purchasing system and enforcing the same gamble awareness notices on the game that are in place on betting apps. 

Pegi have rated FIFA as suitable for children rated 3 and up, yet on gambling the website specifies that 'contain elements that encourage or teach gambling' are 'Pegi 12, 16, or 18'. We call upon Pegi to immediately make the reasonable changes based upon the guidelines they have themselves set out. 

The game is up, we need change now. #EndFUTGambling