I play a lot of the soccer video game EA Sports FC Ultimate Team and while the game itself in many ways sucks and is bad (don't ask me why I continue playing it) but it's been sort of fascinating game to watch from a sociological perspective. A little thread:
So the way the game works, is that its a multiplayer video game soccer game with a collectible card game built on top of it. The players you use in each game are determined by what cards you account has, you earn better cards in loot crates by playing etc etc. Basic gacha stuff, not interesting
What *is* sort of interesting is that there's a market inside the game for trading cards for in-game currency. And there's like a subculture online of people who are more into trading on the market to make in-game currency than actually playing the game.
So if you're really into it, you can actually earn better in-game rewards by trading than by playing the game. The game updates every day with new cards etc and what gets released determines largely how prices on the market moves.
So anyway, there's also a culture of "leaks," where people reverse engineer patches pre-release or otherwise obtain the future content early and the use it to make in-game currency by insider trading on the market.
This has existed for a while but the information environment that's developed around it is really interesting. On Twitter/X there are accounts that leak content that are considered authoritative as well as some that leak content that are considered speculative and often wrong.
Mt Gox, of Bitcoin theft fame, is so named because it was originally mtgox, as in Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange
I think about this from time to time
The shady, greedy dynamics of FIFA the video game now accurately reflect the shady, greedy dynamics of FIFA irl. What’s wild is that the games were a cash cow even before EA got all Gordon Gekko with them.
Kids' First Capitalism has come a long way since I used to play the WoW Auction House back in 2009. I don't remember getting involved with any fake-money financial crimes, in retrospect we were rank amateurs.
for a while in vanilla wow i had cornered the market on ghost mushrooms (which only spawned in one location and were necessary for the warlock epic mount quest) on my server. was very profitable.
Ah, the good old days. I had the epic mount mats and my guild would run people through Dire Maul for 50G. I've done that instance so many times I could run it in my sleep, even now.
I was mostly playing in WotLK, so so my main hustle was the high-level original game enchantments which were still in high demand, but no one was farming the areas where the materials and recipes dropped. Also had the fun abandoned theme park feeling of going into old high level areas.
but can't you just just play matches with stock rosters or custom? I don't get why people jumped on this mode when you can (or at least used to back on ps3) just play seasons and leagues with edited rosters.
yes, if you want competitive multiplayer its the primary game mode and tbh i like that there's a cumulative roster building aspect to it despite having a lot of problems with how thats implemented
