EA Sports — Fifa Online Tournament Platform

About the Client

Electronic Arts Inc. is an American company that develops and distributes video games.

Blockbuster LLC, known as Blockbuster Video, was an American franchise of video stores, specializing in movie and video game rentals through physical stores, mail-order services, and video-on-demand.

Microplay is a chain of stores in Chile, specializing in games and accessories for the latest consoles on the market, collectible toys, software and PC accessories.

The Challenge

EA Sports and Blockbuster needed to create a dynamic to increase the sales of the Fifa (soccer) game in stores, which would allow them to have more presales of the game a month before its launch.

The Solution

A national Fifa tournament should be held, in which only those who had bought the new Fifa in pre-sale could participate. When making the purchase in the store, a unique registration code came on the ticket so that they could register and be able to play and generate statistics.

The Result

3 massive tournaments were held in Mexico for 3 consecutive years, increasing the number of pre-sales sales and tournament registrations. This model was replicated in Chile in Microplay stores, with another 3 annual tournaments.

• Players used PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles.
• 24/7 real-time support was given to players.
• Tournaments are between 2 weeks and 1 month long.
• There were more than 12,000 players per tournament, playing all the time and increasing the statistics.
• The tournament platform was available to players 24/7 with real-time statistics updates.
• Created a tournament ranking with game-specific stats.
• The 3 prizes for first place in the Blockbuster tournaments were: a car, an all-expense paid trip and $50,000 pesos in cash.
• The prizes of the Microplay tournaments were vouchers to redeem products within their stores.

Technology

AWS, PHP, HTML, CSS, JSON