A bug has left thousands of people with a character in the money-sucking, gambling-addicted mode of Electronic Arts’ soccer game, which was supposed to cost over £700 ($885)…

Despite the parting of the ways between Electronic Arts and FIFA, the Andrew Wilson-led publisher will continue to release its annual soccer game, which includes an Ultimate Team mode, despite leaving the license. One of its challenges appears to have been buggy, giving thousands of people access to a character (Lionel Messi, Team of the Year version) worth more than £700 or about $885. Players had about 24 minutes to get a large percentage of this otherwise extremely rare character.

Naturally, the bug went viral on social media and Electronic Arts was alerted. The publisher then made the challenge unavailable, and many members of the public demanded that they be compensated with this item, as those who were not currently logged in could find themselves at an excessive disadvantage by not being able to get the Team of the Year Lionel Messi card…

“An SBC was released on January 30th at 10am PST with an 86+ OVR non-tradable reward from 13 leagues that had at least one TOTY Player Item. Two of these leagues had only one item that met the 86+ OVR threshold (Rest Of World and MLS). The SBC was live for 24 minutes before it was removed after a design issue was identified. During this time, an estimated 0.7% of Ultimate Team players received a TOTY Messi item. We understand that this caused frustration within the Ultimate Team community, and we apologize and appreciate your patience. We have explored several scenarios for how to proceed in a way that is both fair and maintains the long-term health of the game. We can confirm the following: Players who completed this SBC while it was available will keep their rewards. The SBC will not return in its original form. We know this is not a perfect solution, and we will continue to review our processes to minimize these issues in the future,” Electronic Arts wrote.

As always, we’ll write it down: these digital cards will be worthless in a year’s time, because EA Sports FC 25 is coming…

Source: VGC, Electronic Arts