Microtransaction politics in FIFA Ultimate Team: game fans, Twitch streamers, and Electronic Arts

The video game FIFA (Electronic Arts) is an annually released title with a very profitable “FIFA Ultimate Team” (FUT) game mode played by a large community of gamers. This has led to the emergence of celebrity FUT content creators on Twitch and on YouTube, yet also tensions between these individuals, the “average” player, and the game’s developers. The chapter explores players’ attitudes to and issues with the more powerful actors within the FUT ecosystem, offering us an incisive case study of ongoing changes and tensions in the relationships between players, developers, and content creators. In study design and analysis, the qualitative directed content analysis approach was used, as the chapter extands the project conducted over three years on the official FUT forum by one of the authors. Key categories of gamers’ criticism of content creators are indicated, keeping in mind biases that could result from this deductive approach. The players see content creators on Twitch and YouTube as a source of numerous frustrations related to gameplay, as reinforcing the game’s micropayment, and even as solely self-interested profit-makers with little “true” interest in the game. This even extends to what can only be termed conspiracy theories about the relationships between EA and FUT’s most visible content creators, with players proposing numerous surreptious connectinos between the two. The chapter hence shows what happens when successful game content creators, and the “average” player, clash, and how FUT is a valuable case study of emerging power dynamics within gaming and game culture more broadly.