The world’s highest governing body for football sports, FIFA, has announced a range of what appears to be mediocre blockchain world cup games. Earlier this year, EA Sports and FIFA ended 30 years of partnership as FIFA started to make unreasonable demands.
Since then, negotiations between both parties got messier with time. EA wanted to expand the license into areas such as NFTs, while FIFA focused on retaining more control so it could partner with other companies.
This tug of war resulted in EA cutting its ties with FIFA and pulling back from paying the $1 billion price tag that was allegedly being requested to extend the existing exclusivity deal.
With the latest announcement, FIFA published a press release titled “FIFA unveils range of new web 3.0 games ahead of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.” This new range of games includes the following:
1. FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Edition, which is a 4-on-4 casual football game which, as per the critics, has nothing special or even basic Web3 game traits.
2. The second is FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 in the Upland Metaverse, which is the largest blockchain-based map to the real world, according to the press release. In this, players can buy or sell virtual properties, giving it a vibe of 2021 metaverse projects. Basically, nothing new came from it as well.
3. The third Matchday Challenge: FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Edition, which is based on football cards.
4. The fourth is FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 on Phygtl, a fan engagement mobile app. Critics showed their disappointment with this one, saying it doesn’t even sound like a game but a blockchain fever dream.
Well, it seems like these blockchain-based games failed to build clout and are heavily criticized for being below basic and full of mediocre metaverse concepts. However, it’s not the first time FIFA has stepped into a decentralized world. Most recently, FIFA has announced the launch of the NFT platform ‘FIFA+Collect.
