The ongoing situation between FIFA Ultimate Team packs and its association with gambling has apparently come to a momentary conclusion in an Austrian court, which has concluded that the packs are, indeed, gambling. The complaint forces PlayStation to refund the plaintiff, who purchased €300 worth of these packs through the PlayStation Store in a single night.
TheGamer reports that the court has also decided that FIFA packs will be treated as “games of chance that require a license.” This hasn’t been put into practice yet, but this one change means EA, who directly profits from the FIFA packs the most, will be forced to seek out a gambling license and effectively admit that these microtransactions are gambling.
EA already attempted to mitigate the issues that befell FIFA Ultimate Team by telling Eurogamer that kids shouldn’t be purchasing these packs and highlighting some of the good the studio’s done to stamp out gambling addiction. Even so, it’s unlikely we’ll hear any more about this any time soon, and odds are we won’t hear anything from FIFA itself as the company has distanced itself from EA.