FIFA World

~ the goodbye ~

FIFA World was built for the internet cafe audience and I had been out of that audience for a decade by the time it launched. Between 2002 and 2005 I played counter-strike on cafe machines in Turkey, which is exactly the room EA was aiming at: a shared machine of unknown age with no console anywhere near it, running whatever would work on the hardware already in the box. By 2014 I was thirty and working as an engineer, and a product whose entire pitch was low system requirements had nothing to say to me.

EA announced it on 9 August 2013 and put it into open beta on 12 November in Brazil and Russia, which tells you the plan without anyone having to explain it. Two enormous football countries where consoles were thin on the ground and the installed PC base was old. A global release followed on 20 May 2014. It shipped in ten languages and carried the licensed clubs and national sides from FIFA 15.

It was free, it was PC only, and it never came out of beta. EA Canada ran it in open beta for eighteen months and then stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

Two modes carried the whole thing. League Teams gave you a licensed club and a season to play. Ultimate Team was the card collecting economy that had by then become the most profitable object EA had ever built, ported into a free client and paid for with FIFA Points instead of a box price.

That combination is the interesting part of the grave. FIFA World was the company checking whether the Ultimate Team machine could run without a sixty dollar game holding it up, in markets that were never going to buy the sixty dollar game in the first place. The answer came back no. The question was a reasonable one, and every free to play sports title since has asked some version of it.

~ eighteen months of beta ~

On 15 April 2015 EA announced the end. New account registration stopped that day and so did the sale of FIFA Points. Live content stopped with it, which meant Team of the Week, the weekly squad refresh that gave Ultimate Team its rhythm, simply never updated again. The modes stayed playable for another three months on a game that had visibly stopped being maintained.

The statement was unusually plain for a shutdown notice. EA said it did not have the momentum to bring the game to a full commercial launch. Not a rights problem, not a technical one. A year and a half of open beta had not found enough people to justify finishing it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The servers went off on 14 July 2015 and nothing carried over. FIFA World accounts sat apart from every other FIFA product, so the clubs people had built and the points they had bought stayed on the dead service. There was no console version to migrate into and no PC release of FIFA that would take the data.

EA switched off a group of its other free to play PC titles in the same stretch, which was the company closing the experiment rather than closing one game. FIFA's free to play answer ended up being FIFA Online, run under license by regional publishers in Asia, and later the mobile version. Both of those work. Neither of them is this one.

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