FIFA 18 Players Organizing Black Friday Sale Boycott

The Black Friday sale in FIFA 18 is going to have a bit of a harder time than usual this year. Players have started getting together to boycott it. There are many reasons behind the boycott, including many unsolved issues with the game, rampant microtransactions, and the pay-to-win in-game economy.

Riding on the wave of the Star Wars Battlefront 2, FIFA players have finally decided to raise their voices. If you’re not familiar with the situation, things are pretty bad. The whole loot box drama going on around Battlefront 2? Yeah, that’s been going on in FIFA for years. And players have been complaining, only for EA to completely ignore them. Well, with the gaming community (finally) taking a stand against greedy publishers, FIFA fans are also starting to push back against EA.

Que the birth of #FixFifa and the online petition formed around it. Currently, the petition currently has almost 27.000 signatures at the time of writing. It has a whole list of demands for EA, which, by the way, continues in a Reddit post. It’s basically a laundry list of various things that don’t work in the game, both in terms of bugs and gameplay issues, as well as calling for EA to be more transparent, etc. It also references the Weekend League, an event where people can earn a bunch of stuff, but only if you play 40 games in 3 days, which is quite a lot.

Then, of course, there’s the call to boycott the in-game Black Friday sale. Now, when I said that the situation in FIFA is at least just as bad as Battlefront 2, I wasn’t kidding. The thing is, FIFA revolves around building your Ultimate Team. You have to earn the best players for the team either by grinding for hours and hours or, you’ve guessed it, by shelling out a couple of bucks. As YouTuber Goran Popovic told Polygon: “I get that Ultimate Team was designed to make money for EA, lots of money. But the balance has shifted from a good game with micro-transactions to one where you kind of need to spend money to save time, unless you’re super lucky or one of the greatest players.” Hopefully, now that EA is already in seriously hot water and retreating, FIFA fans will also manage to get at least some of their demands.