Nepenthez explains the biggest problems with the FIFA 21 FUT market
NepentheZ/EA SportsPopular FIFA 21 content creator Craig ‘Nepenthez’ Douglas claims the so-called #eagate scandal that has rocked the community over the past week just goes to show how terrible the market in FUT really is.
Chances are by now you’ve heard about the scandal involving an EA employee scalping FUT ICON cards that aren’t on the market to players for cold hard cash, dubbed “EA Gate” by the community on social media.
Besides the obvious ethical implications of running a back-alley operation like this, the whole situation has left a bad taste in a lot of players’ mouths, with it being pointed to as just the symptoms of s deeper, underlying problem in the game.
— EA SPORTS FIFA (@EASPORTSFIFA) March 10, 2021
In a video released on March 10, Nepenthez broke this sentiment down, and explained that it’s the fact most highly rated and sought after FIFA cards are only available for obscene amounts of money – if they’re even available at all.
“One thing that this does kind of really expose is just how bad the market in FIFA is, that people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on virtual cards in a one-year game cycle because they’re unobtainable otherwise,” Douglas explained. “If you want this Pele card, you don’t really have a choice except to buy it from the black market.”
The fact people are driven to less-than-reputable card sellers because the items they want aren’t on the in-game market is one part of the problem, but the other is that, even if they are, they’re so expensive they’re basically impossible to get anyways.
“I’ve played about 1400 hours of FIFA 21, and never in a million years could I afford one of these cards, if it were on the market,” Nepenthez pointed out. “The fact that these cards, that people are paying real money for, are so inaccessible, is the biggest problem here.”
Video below starts at 8:21 for mobile users.
But that’s not all: Even people who did it the “right way” according to Nepenthez, by buying their FUT Coins in-game with thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, couldn’t even afford most of the ICON Prime moments cards.
“Even if they could, they’re not on the market,” the streamer pointed out. “It’s just shambolic people are being forced to go to a black market to buy ICONs because they are inaccessible otherwise in a yearly-cycle game.”
EA has promised to investigate the allegations that one of their employees was running their own, unsanctioned one-stop ICON shop, but that might not be enough for players who want to see fixes to the problems Nepenthez laid out here. Whether anyone at EA Sports is listening and paying attention to the community though, remains to be seen.
