There are still a few weeks until it comes out FIFA 23 coins, but a few lucky ones have managed to get hold of the game at a price that borders on free. Apparently, the next title of the Electronic Arts soccer franchise was on presale for only 6 cents for a few hours. Will they honor the purchase or cancel the orders? Well, the truth is that the store has made a rather surprising decision.
FIFA 23 opens with an own goal
And no, that headline is not a joke. It is practically what the managers of Electronic Arts themselves have said when recognizing the blunder. In the world of video games, it is quite common for players to get hold of titles in virtual stores in other countries to benefit from discounts or even to earn with the currency exchange. However, what has happened to FIFA 23 coins it was a error of those of a lifetime. For a short period of time, the Epic Games Store India had for sale FIFA 23: Ultimate Edition for a few 4,80 rupees, which comes to be the equivalent of about 6 cents or about 6 euro cents now that there is euro-dollar parity.
Electronic Arts will not cancel the purchase to customers who have made this unusual offer of 99,98%. They recognize that it has been a mistake caused by themselves —probably a mistake in placing the comma. Therefore, those who have taken advantage of the offer will have the game at that price almost free. This information has been confirmed first hand by EA managers to the people of PC Gamer:
"It was our mistake, and we wanted to let you know that we will honor all pre-purchases made at that price"
Should you take advantage of pricing errors?
Here we could open a big melon. Clearly, a conglomerate like Electronic Arts isn't going to flinch about giving away several hundred or thousands of copies of FIFA 23 coins for price error. However, other smaller companies might not survive a similar ruling.
Without going any further, just over a week ago we had a couple of quite remarkable cases. One related to a third-party price error from Amazon and another also related to video games, almost a carbon copy of what happened with FIFA 23.
The first of all the errors had to do with a failure of the Spigen official store on Amazon Spain. A poorly programmed discount code allowed some users to order tens, hundreds and thousands of mobile phone cases for free. The error occurred overnight, and Amazon has been known to ship several thousand cases to customers, a cost that the manufacturer ended up assuming.
The second case was much worse. The protagonist was the game Shin-Chan: My summer with the teacher. Due to a failure -also with the comma when placing the price-, in the Nintendo eShop of Colombia, the game became worth just a few cents. The internet was flooded with tutorials explaining how to get the title with Club Nintendo's own Gold Points. In this case, such an absurd mistake can cause a Shin-Chan game to never be translated into our language again. This tweet from Narehop — who worked on Alex Kidd Miracle World- explains perfectly why you should not take advantage of errors of this type:
https://twitter.com/NareHop/status/1555905066854383616?s=20&t=K9DsoZ8QPrN4_mqab_Yf0g