Yes, it's easy to drop money on packs and either get a pack of duds or (less often) an amazing player. I tend to get quite lucky spending a few hundred pounds in total, but there are videos of YouTubers dropping £1000+ in a day and barely getting anything interesting.
A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite effect of players there getting a major advantage :-D
> A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins"
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value". For example, in NV (as a stereotypical representation of a locale allows gambling), the law defines[1]:
>> “Representative of value” means any instrumentality used by a patron in a game whether or not the instrumentality may be redeemed for cash.
>> “Wager” means a sum of money or representative of value that is risked on an occurrence for which the outcome is uncertain.
Any type of in-game "coin" still represents value to the people playing the game, so trading them for lootboxes with uncertain contents is still a "wager".
The gaming industry could solve a lot of this mess if they simply *sold people the game (or game pieces) directly as a defined product. Of course, that wouldn't exploit the human weakness to operant conditioning[2]... ~sigh~
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value".
Ah, maybe I'm misunderstanding the concepts involved, but coins in FIFA are more directly convertible into the end result, more like buying a currency. With "coins" you can buy players directly in the game for a known value on a marketplace (you can also buy packs, but this could be disabled).
With the current system (where you buy "FIFA points") you can only use the FIFA points to open packs of "random" players, which is where the gambling element comes in.
The issue is the one of random drops for real money. It’s easy to see that has a gambling element to it.