Gaming

What FIFA needs to steal from Dota 2

If EA wants to take its biggest title to the next level, it could learn a lot from Valve.

Written by Alex Dyet

4 min readPublished on 27.07.2016 · 8:26 UTC

EA’s FIFA franchise is one of the most successful gaming series ever, its latest title dominating sales charts across the world since its release. Billions of hours are spent each month by players across the world playing FIFA on multiple consoles. Yet despite its huge fan base, competitive FIFA is still a relatively undeveloped scene – especially when you compare it to MOBAs like Dota 2 with their die-hard fans and million dollar prize pools.

Whilst Gfinity and ESL’s online tournaments have opened FIFA up to competitive play a bit, the game will needs some major changes if it wants to grow as an eSport over the next few years. If EA does decide to step in and make some changes, it could grab a few ideas from Valve on how to build a successful competitive scene.

Sponsored tournaments

The major change FIFA’s professional scene needs is a developer sponsored tournament. Valve’s International provides a focus for its competitive players each year and its lucrative prize pool drives competition and attracts interest from gamers around the world. Valve has recently even established a system of four Majors each year, which provides a focal point for professional players each quarter and helps makes Dota 2 a viable career choice for those talented enough to make it onto the professional circuit.

Yes, there’s an annual FIFA Interactive World Cup, but with a $20,000 prize it’s small fry – we can’t help but wonder what would happen if EA opened the tournament up with televised events and even crowdfunding for the jackpot by some Compendium equivalent. Whilst this is a long way off for EA, a major tournament with some serious backing would give the competitive scene a massive boost.

A genuine competitive mode

Like FIFA, Dota 2 has multiple game modes and each one is fun in its own way. But whilst All Random Deathmatch is hilarious when you’re messing around, for professional matches Captains Mode is the format of choice since it provides the most balanced, team orientated gameplay. These matches are usually played out in a ‘best of three’ format. In FIFA a competitive mode has not yet been established. Gfinity offers Ultimate Team and Head to Head ladder matches – but Ultimate Team is a ‘pay to win’ game mode to a certain extent, and you can bet that Head to Head matches will be played out by the five-star teams exclusively. FIFA needs a mode with reduced AI assistance to make the game feel more balanced and with rules in place to force a range of teams to be selected.

A unified game

Whilst we don’t expect FIFA will be ‘free to play’ any time soon, creating a single title that synchronises across platforms – instead of annual, full price iterations – would be a huge change that could bring the various console communities together. In a similar way, instead of releasing a totally new game each year, EA could consider introducing a yearly subscription for a game that updates annually, in the same way that Dota does, but does not require players to buy a completely new title. At the moment, the yearly release of the next FIFA game makes the competitive scene very unstable: players might struggle to adapt, the new game might be a disappointment, every release will have balance issues that will need to be resolved.

More hats please

Crystal Maiden Snowdrop Set
© Anuxinamoon & Valve

Valve’s market, which allows players to buy and sell cosmetics is a major source of revenue for the studio, but also encourages players to personalise their game and create new items for them to sell. Whilst hero sets are not necessary, being able to alter the game with sets for your favourite heroes and unique cosmetics for the map is extremely satisfying for people who have invested thousands of hours into the game, and provides diversity to the game’s visuals. Whilst FIFA does provide some options to equip new kits or boots, expanding this into stadium customisation and a system of super rare rewards for the top players would make the game more spectator friendly.

More community involvement

The most successful eSports are often games that encourage fans to actively get involved, whether that’s creating items for the market, taking part in cosplay or fan art competitions, or simply posting hilarious memes on Reddit. Building a passionate community takes serious investment from the developers and requires careful thought. Since Dota originated as a mod, Valve has always prioritised allowing the community to play an active role in how the game is developed and this has paid off massively, with fans even creating fantastic in-game custom modes. EA should consider allowing its fans a bit more input, whether that means releasing developer tools or allowing them to design their own boots.

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