Electronic Arts is once again proving why so many gamers despise them with their antics. This time, the controversy surrounds FIFA 20, the latest AAA football release for the yearly EA franchise. The game just came out last month, and right away things started going wrong. The fans who bought the game reported myriad issues with bugs and other problems, but little did we know, that EA’s screwups would only get far worse. Not only is the career mode a broken and buggy mess with completely unbalanced and unpredictable gameplay quirks, made far worse by the fact that EA clearly prioritized the FUT modes as they contain the gambling mechanics, but now we’ve got personal details being leaked too.
It turns out that in the rush to not test the game, the company also forgot to debug their website, specifically the portion dedicated to handling registration for the FIFA 20 Global Series of tournaments. Usernames, country of residence, email addresses and dates of birth were shown to unauthenticated users, meaning that anyone who registered within the system could potentially gain access to the personal details of hundreds of users, with an alleged 1,600 people affected by the data leak so far. It has also been reported that high-profile FIFA players were also affected.
“We’re aware of a potential issue affecting the registration page for the EA SPORTS FIFA 20 Global Series that went live earlier today,” EA said. They have since pulled down the page for registrations while they fix the problem.
And this isn’t even the first time this year that a major release has been plagued by such an issue. The consistent controversy machine, Fallout 76, moldy helmets and all, had a very similar series of problems when the nylon bag issues happened. If you somehow forgot, this incident occurred when Falout 76 falsely advertised that the $200 Power Armor Edition would include a canvas bag, and fans instead got a crappy nylon one instead. When gamers registered with Bethesda support to claim recompense, their personal information was exposed to other users. One would think Electronic Arts would like to avoid such problems, but I guess it was just too hard to debug a website while also raking in cash from gambling at the same time. Some people would really like an explanation, to the tune that thousands have signed a petition on Change.org demanding an apology over FIFA 20‘s various problems, but it’s just as likely that EA will just try to say these aren’t data leaks, they’re surprise mechanics.
It all seems incredibly reckless, given how deadly and commonplace harassment and doxxing has become online in the modern era. It’s all too easy to harass people online, and here we have EA helping that toxic process along. It seems like that whole caring about personal privacy isn’t all that serious for the gaming giant.
