If you're not interested in my take on this, stop reading here and don't waste your time. It isn't a rant but it is my take on what we have seen from EA this year in MUT and why
So this whole year has been interesting but this new position on obtaining presents by EA , where we KNOW they are limiting the ability to get free ones to a select few grinders and top tier players, is going to end up in money offers for snowflakes/presents. This is not new but the way they did this by gating free presents, only allowing a select few to really make out well on presents from the "event", inevitably to end in money offers has really triggered me to write what I believe and partly what I know from my experience in the corporate/financial industry. Because by doing it this way, they increase the % of players who will feel they want/need to spend real money on the snowflake offers when they drop since less people will be able to get enough snowflakes for the amount of presents they used to be able to get in past Maddens.
What I truly think happened was this: EA said this would be a "make or break" year for Madden. They didn't have to make that public but they did....because the game was reaching new lows and every year was taking a hit. So they made that edict public, on social media. Either they had no intention of really trying to "make" as opposed to "break" or they realized early on that they just couldn't make the game the way they said they could. Partially because from a Corporate standpoint they didn't want to invest more resources into the franchise and partly because they had done such a bang up job on ruining the game, code, etc that fixing it would be tantamount to creating an entirely new game and that wasn't going to happen.
So a decision was made to just blatantly cash grab as much as possible. To gate things that were never gated before. To control the MUT economy more than they ever had. Go out with a bang. If they can't/wont fix it and the potential to lose more customers is there, why not?