According to the well-known FIFA leaker DonkTrading FIFA 23 will be Free-to-Play! This is EA’s reaction to Konami’s announcement that eFootball will officially be free-to-play in the future. But what does this mean for FIFA? Will FIFA 23 be Free-to-Play?
That would be great! FIFA 23 as a free game, can you imagine something like that? But if a developer could afford it, it would be EA. EA earns an incredible amount of money with Ultimate Team year after year, so theoretically they could rely on this mainstay.
Leak: FIFA 23 will be Free-to-Play!
The well known and actually trustworthy leaker @DonkTrading already announced a few days ago that FIFA 23 is Free-to-Play and also features Cross Platform. That sounds really cool! FIFA would counter Konami’s new concept with this. The Japanese company has announced that eFootball (formerly PES) will be available as a free-to-play game from now on.
FIFA 23 becomes free-to-play – the end for Konami’s eFootball (PES)?
If the leak is true, it would be a declaration of bankruptcy for Konami, as the only advantage eFootball has over FIFA would be gone. It’s questionable at the moment how eFootball will be financed, since it doesn’t have a game mode as popular as FIFA Ultimate Team. So the eternal comparison between PES and FIFA goes into the next round.
Leak: FIFA 23 will be free-to-play! Ultimate Team finances the game
If FIFA 23 would be really free, EA would have to earn all the money by FIFA Ultimate Team. Currently this is really conceivable, because many gamers invest several thousand Euros every year to build up a good FUT team. Without this pay-to-win aspect, you can hardly achieve anything in FUT Champions, that’s unfortunately a fact. If you do poorly in FUT Champions, you can’t qualify for eSports either.
So EA has a big financial prop with Ultimate Team. In the past, a document has also surfaced revealing that FUT is the cornerstone in FIFA. Say the game is built in such a way that you inevitably end up in Ultimate Team and spend real money on packs there. This also reignited the gambling debate.
Speaking of gambling: FUT is already banned in some countries, as EA is accused of gambling here. If these accusations continue, EA could no longer finance itself through this game mode.
FIFA 23 will be Free-to-Play – what speaks against it?
EA would first of all lose a lot of revenue by selling the full version. FIFA 21 alone was sold more than 1.5 million times already in February. In addition, there are the different versions, the Ultimate or Champions Edition cost up to 100€.
For FIFA 22 EA announced that a free upgrade to the Next-Gen is only possible with the Ultimate Edition – there the greed for money of the Canadians comes out again. Therefore it’s really hard to imagine that FIFA 23 would be free of charge. Furthermore, not everyone plays FUT – many other game modes like the career mode, Pro Clubs or Volta are also popular. EA would have to put these modes behind a paywall in a free-to-play version. Sounds absurd.
Leak: FIFA 23 will be Free-to-Play! Can we trust the leak?
Leaks are always such a thing… Often certain posts only fuel discussions. Until the time of Konami’s release about the free-to-play eFootball game, nothing has been heard from EA in this regard – and suddenly these rumors appear. Donk Trading is actually a reliable leaker, but with this post we have to be careful for now.
FIFA 23 RELEASE – WHAT IS KNOWN SO FAR
FIFA 22 is still in full operation, but in the background the game makers of EA Sports are already working on the next part – FIFA 23 will be released in autumn 2022.
But under which name will the classic game be continued in autumn 2022? As things stand, it is not at all certain that the game will continue to bear the name of the world association FIFA. We have the most important information about FIFA 23 for you, why the game series will get a new name and on which consoles the next part of the soccer simulation will be available.
WHEN WILL FIFA 23 BE RELEASED?
We can’t give you an official launch date for the next part of the FIFA game series yet. EA hasn’t communicated much in this regard yet, so so far we can only assume that FIFA 23 will be released in the period between mid-September and early October 2022, just like its predecessors. In the past years, the latest launch date of a FIFA game was October 06.