\n<\/p>\n
But while Madden<\/em> gets much of the attention in the United States, EA\u2019s real heavyweight is the soccer game EA FC.<\/em> (The game was formerly known as FIFA,<\/em> before EA\u2019s partnership with the FIFA organization ended in 2022.) FC<\/em> is notorious for minting money through a game-within-the-game called Ultimate Team, where players can spend endless amounts of money for packs of digital \u201ccards\u201d that represent individual soccer players. The players in those packs are random, as are their stats, which gives Ultimate Team players a slot machine-like compulsion. They want to acquire cards of their favorite players, but also the best<\/em> version of their favorite players, because winning games will get a player even more cards. It\u2019s ingenious, terribly extractive, and almost every major sports game on the market has a feature like this now\u2014but FC<\/em> has long been the most profitable of them all<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of these assets make EA an appealing blue-chip acquisition for private equity investment, especially since, as the Financial Times<\/em> reports<\/a>, those investors believe that the company\u2019s operating costs can be lowered significantly with the use of AI. (A claim no one in the games industry has managed to deliver on just yet.) EA\u2019s sports games also dovetail nicely with both the Crown Prince\u2019s real-world soccer efforts and his nation\u2019s continued gaming investments<\/a>, which seek to further entangle the nation with the global economy and ultimately lure jobs to Riyadh.<\/p>\n