Electronic Arts booked $4.09 billion from extra content in fiscal 2026, more than half of its $7.53 billion in net revenue. Its last annual report before a buyout took the company private named the extra content in Ultimate Team as its most popular live service.
Some of that money goes on packs, bundles of virtual footballers and items whose contents stay hidden until they're opened. Paying for a result that chance decides is the part of modern games that critics and regulators keep comparing to a casino, and in 2026 the comparison reached two American courtrooms.
The borrowing runs both ways. Games adopted the paid draw and a spinning reveal that those lawsuits liken to a slot machine, while sweepstakes casinos picked up the daily rewards that free-to-play games use to bring players back. Studios and governments have answered in different ways since, and the dated record of each step shows where the lines actually fall.
Ultimate Team Is The Revenue Line EA Calls Material
EA's filing doesn't give Ultimate Team a revenue figure of its own, but it leaves no doubt about the mode's weight. Ultimate Team lets players collect current and former athletes and compete with a squad they've built. The report calls the revenue from extra content bought inside it, a substantial portion of it from FC Ultimate Team, material to the business.
Extra content slipped for two straight years, from $4.46 billion in fiscal 2024 to $4.37 billion in 2025 and then to the 2026 figure. Digital live services and other revenue still made up 71% of the total. Among the things the company said could hurt its FC franchise, Ultimate Team included, it listed "real or perceived security or regulatory risks."
Packs are where that scrutiny lands. The Netherlands' highest administrative court described one in a 2022 ruling: it holds virtual footballers or other items, nobody knows the exact contents beforehand, and whatever comes out can be traded on the mode's transfer market for in-game coins. The great majority of packs, the court found, are obtained by playing, including with coins earned in matches and in-game tasks. Others can be bought with points that cost real money.
The paid share is what invites the casino comparison, money in and a random result out. FIFA's packs figured in three of the European decisions set out further down.
Two 2026 Lawsuits Compare Counter-Strike's Case Reel To A Slot Machine
Counter-Strike 2 sells the draw in a different way. Players pick up cases by playing, then buy a key to open one. What follows is the reel: a strip of possible skins scrolls across the screen, fast at first, then slower, until a line settles on a single item.
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Valve over that system on February 25 in state court in Manhattan. Her complaint puts most keys at $2.49 and says opening a case "even resembles a virtual slot machine: a wheel cycles through potential items before stopping on one." It adds that a stop just beside a valuable item creates the illusion of a "near miss," and it calls the model "quintessential gambling, prohibited under New York's Constitution and Penal Law."
A federal class action followed less than two weeks later in Seattle. Two players, Alexander Flauto and Jackson Meyer, brought it, and their complaint, which relies on Washington law, describes the same animation and says it "has no bearing on the outcome as depicted." Both filings say a random number generator on Valve's server picks the item once the player clicks to open the case.
Valve rejects the gambling claim. In a statement to New York customers soon afterward, it compared its boxes to "baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags" and said digital packs like its own date back to 2004. The items inside are purely cosmetic, it added. Valve also said it has locked more than a million Steam accounts that third parties misused, including for gambling, and that it bars gambling-related businesses from taking part in or sponsoring tournaments for its games.
These are allegations, and Valve's statement says a court will ultimately decide whose position is correct. Valve moved in May to dismiss the New York case, and a federal judge in Seattle had already combined the players' suit with two similar ones.
Sweepstakes Casinos Run On Features Players Know From Games
Both crossings so far ran from the casino toward the game. Sweepstakes casinos show the traffic going the other way. These US platforms offer casino-style games through two virtual currencies, and the features built around them, from tournaments to rewards for logging in each day, mirror ones common in free-to-play games.
That puts the reverse crossing on one screen, which is why a single operator's feature set is worth reading closely. McLuck, launched in 2023 by B-Two Operations Limited, shows the two together: its tournaments and game-show-style titles, Crash Live among them, are set out in this mcluck review from Legal Sports Report, next to its daily login rewards and the rules for its Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins.
Those rules follow the usual two-coin design, as the review describes it. Gold Coins have no redemption value, so their only use is play. Sweeps Coins arrive with bonuses and promotions or through mail-in requests, must be played through once, and can then be redeemed for gift cards or cash equivalents where allowed. Casino play of either kind, with real money or sweepstakes coins, is for adults only. For McLuck, the review gives the minimum age as 21.
Some lawmakers now define their target by its mechanics. Maine's LD 2007, signed on April 6, 2026, covers any online game, contest or promotion that uses a dual-currency system of payment and simulates casino-style gaming, from slot machines and table games to bingo and sports wagering. Running or promoting one is a civil violation there, and the state's criminal code now treats it as unlawful gambling.
The law stops at Maine's border, and where no statute names the model, its status remains a live legal question. The review also prints the states where McLuck doesn't operate. That list is the company's own choice, and it says nothing either way about what any state's law allows.
Studios Are Redesigning The Reveal And The Price
Back in games, studios have been changing the mechanic itself, though not always saying why. Valve has run an X-Ray Scanner in France since 2019. Players there must scan a case to reveal its item before they can buy a key, and they have to claim that item before the scanner will work on another case.
On March 16, 2026, Valve brought the scanner to players in Germany and the Netherlands, where cases can now only be opened through it. The release notes gave no reason. A scan moves the reveal ahead of the payment, but a player can't shop around: the item is locked in once it's shown, and the only way to scan another case is to buy the item already revealed.
Blizzard changed how its boxes arrive. The original Overwatch sold loot boxes for real money until Blizzard stripped them out in 2022. When they returned in Overwatch 2's 15th season, early in 2025, they came through the free track of the battle pass and weekly rewards, and players could earn them just by playing. The interface promised a legendary cosmetic within every 20 boxes, and senior systems designer Gavin Winter promised transparency "about what's inside and the rate of various drops."
HoYoverse, the studio behind gacha games such as Genshin Impact, went a step further with Nodusfall, a free-to-play game it revealed at Gamescom in August. The studio then confirmed that the game won't hand out characters through random draws. In a statement quoted by PC Gamer, it said it hopes to let players "unlock this core gameplay experience through continued play," and that cosmetic monetization is an important avenue it will consider.
Five Of Six Decisions Kept Loot Boxes Out Of Gambling Law
Governments and courts that took up the question reached different answers with different tools. Of the six below, only Belgium treated paid loot boxes as gambling.
Jurisdiction | What It Decided About Loot Boxes | Year |
|---|---|---|
Belgium, Gaming Commission | Paid loot boxes in the games it examined, FIFA 18 among them, met the gaming law's definition of a game of chance | 2018 |
Netherlands, Council of State | Overturned the gambling regulator's order against EA, ruling that FIFA packs couldn't be judged as a game on their own | 2022 |
United Kingdom, government | Held off on legislation while the trade body Ukie published guidance on parental consent and odds disclosure | 2023 |
Australia, federal government | Games with paid loot boxes must carry at least an M rating, and games with simulated gambling an R 18+ | 2024 |
Brazil, National Congress | Banned loot boxes in games aimed at, or likely to reach, children and teenagers, in force since March 17, 2026 | 2025 |
Austria, Supreme Court | Ruled that FIFA Ultimate Team packs aren't a game of chance under the country's gaming act | 2025 |
Austria's ruling, dated December 18, 2025, turned partly on money leaving the game. Under EA's terms, the court found, points and pack contents have no value outside it and can't be converted into cash, and unofficial resale markets didn't count because they operate outside the contract.
New York's case against Valve leans on the opposite fact. Counter-Strike items sell on Valve's own Steam Community Market, where the complaint says Valve takes a 15% commission, and on outside marketplaces that the attorney general says Valve facilitates. Her office's announcement cited one item reportedly sold for more than $1 million.
The newer rules sidestep the gambling question. Australia's rating change took effect on September 22, 2024, and Brazil's ban relies on each game's age rating to decide which titles it covers. Britain's guidance is voluntary: the government said in 2023 that it wasn't taking forward legislation "at this time," and the industry committed to a 12-month implementation period.
In New York, at least, the question went to court first. Valve's statement noted that state lawmakers have considered the issue a few times without passing a law.
On The Screen, The Odds Are Still Hard To Find
Britain's guidance promised clear odds, and researchers checked whether they arrived. Leon Y. Xiao and Mie L. Lund tracked the UK's 100 highest-grossing iPhone games across 2024, before and after the guidance took effect that July. Among games with loot boxes, none sought a parent's consent before letting an under-18 buy one, and only 8.6% consistently disclosed the odds for every box, their 2025 study in Royal Society Open Science found.
Presentation can mislead even when the odds are published. In November 2025, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Hutch Games over F1 Clash's Golden Spin, a paid wheel of 12 evenly spaced prizes. Players would read it like a physical prize wheel, with an equal chance on every segment, the ASA said, when the real odds varied and sat behind a question-mark icon few would recognize as the way to them.
Xiao, who says he has been involved in several of the regulatory complaints he writes about, read the ruling in his annual loot box review for GamesIndustry.biz as meaning that each segment should be sized to its prize's real chance.
For an adult weighing a key or a coin bundle, the animation says almost nothing about value. The published odds, where they exist, and the rules on whether a prize can be traded or redeemed say far more. Whether the price still makes sense when the common item lands is the buyer's call, and it's the one call the reel can't make