Three Countries Tried to Ban EA's Loot Boxes. The Revenue Went Up.

In November 2017, EA wrote a sentence so universally hated it ended up in a record book. Defending the grind in Star Wars Battlefront II, where unlocking a hero could cost real money or dozens of hours, an EA community manager said the design was meant to give players "a sense of pride and accomplishment." Reddit replied with 683,000 downvotes—certified by Guinness World Records as the most-downvoted comment in the site's history.⁸ It looked like the moment the public finally turned on loot boxes. It was. And it changed almost nothing about the money.

The official story is that the loot-box backlash humbled EA: fans revolted, regulators moved in, and the industry was forced to clean up. The real story is colder. The noise was real. The net revenue loss was not. While the headlines stacked up—a criminal ban here, a multimillion-euro fine there—the engine that actually made the money kept growing its share of EA's entire business, year after year, straight through the storm.

The machine wasn't Battlefront. It was a deck of soccer cards.

Battlefront II was the controversy. Ultimate Team was the cash. The two get conflated, and that confusion is the whole reason people misread what happened. EA's real loot-box franchise is FIFA Ultimate Team—"FUT"—where players buy randomized packs of digital soccer cards hoping to pull a star. It launched quietly as downloadable content for FIFA 09 in 2008, locked to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with packs bought using Microsoft Points or in-game coins; the mode went free-to-access with FIFA 11.³ EA wasn't the first to sell randomized digital goods—that mechanic predates FUT in free-to-play titles—but EA was the first to make it the financial spine of a blockbuster annual franchise. That is a different, more durable achievement than invention.

Read EA's own filings and the scale becomes hard to look away from. The Ultimate Team segment—"a substantial portion" of which is FUT—accounted for roughly 23% of EA's total net revenue in fiscal 2018, then about 28% in 2019 and 27% in 2020.² By fiscal 2021 it was $1.62 billion, about 29% of EA's $5.63 billion in total net revenue, and EA flatly told investors it is "material to our business."¹ Now line that timeline up against the backlash—the 2017 revolt, the 2018 Belgian ban, the 2020 Dutch fine—and notice what the curve does. It goes up.

Why three governments swung and three governments missed

The regulatory attack came in three forms, and each one failed in its own way. Belgium went hardest: in April 2018 its Gaming Commission declared paid loot boxes with tradeable items illegal gambling under a 1999 law, exposing publishers to criminal fines up to €800,000 and even imprisonment. EA complied on paper, announcing in January 2019 it would stop selling FIFA Points in Belgium.⁶ But a criminal ban is only as strong as its enforcement, and there wasn't any. A peer-reviewed 2023 study found that 82% of Belgium's 100 highest-grossing iPhone games still ran randomized monetization after the ban, and the Belgian Minister of Justice conceded the regulator simply lacks the resources to enforce the law.⁷ A ban nobody enforces is a press release with legal formatting.

The Netherlands tried the wallet. Its Gaming Authority issued a penalty order against EA in 2019, and in October 2020 a lower court upheld it—€250,000 per week per EA entity, with a combined ceiling of €10 million if EA refused to comply.⁴ The widely repeated line that "EA was fined €10 million" was always misleading: that was the theoretical maximum, not a bill. EA appealed and never paid a cent. In March 2022 the highest Dutch administrative court, the Council of State, overturned the ruling outright, reasoning that a FUT pack isn't a standalone game of chance but one element of a broader game of skill—so it didn't violate the Dutch Gambling Act at all.⁵ The fine didn't get reduced. It got erased.

And Battlefront II itself? Even there, the "EA capitulated" story is too clean. EA did suspend microtransactions on the eve of launch and cut hero unlock costs sharply.⁸ But it brought a modified, no-pay-to-win monetization system back in 2018. What got removed were paid loot boxes that altered gameplay—not all monetization, and not the core FUT model that was actually making the billions. The loudest battle was fought over the smallest stake.

The honest objection: maybe EA just got lucky on the law

The fair counter is that none of this was strategy—EA simply caught friendly rulings. The Dutch reversal hinged on a single legal interpretation, that a pack is part of a game of skill rather than a standalone bet, and a different court could plausibly have gone the other way.⁵ That's true, and worth saying out loud. But notice that the same structural feature kept winning across very different systems. Belgium's ban failed on enforcement, not interpretation; the Netherlands' fine failed on appeal; the UK never legislated at all. Three independent failure modes, one survivor. The thread isn't luck—it's that loot boxes sit in a genuine legal gray zone (skill-wrapped chance, no cash payout) that is expensive to litigate, slow to legislate, and easy to under-resource. EA didn't need to win every argument. It needed regulators to be slower and poorer than its revenue was sticky. They were.

That is the quiet lesson under all the noise. EA's most valuable asset through the backlash years was never a clever defense of loot boxes. It was the gap between how fast outrage travels and how slowly law does. A revolt can break a launch in a weekend; a habit that spends a little every week is harder to dislodge than any court in three countries managed to be. The downvotes set a world record. The revenue set a higher one—and only one of those showed up on the books.