Five days ago the Security Service of Ukraine, Ukraine's counter-terrorism law enforcement authority, raided what it believed to be an illegal cryptocurrency farm. Inside the warehouse, officers discovered not PCs with cutting-edge Nvidia 30 Series graphics cards but racks and racks of PS4s instead. It's now being reported that the mining facility wasn't farming cryptocurrency, but instead something potentially more lucrative. It was farming FIFA, Electronic Arts' soccer franchise, and the gray market surrounding Ultimate Team.
Initial reports of the situation assumed that the Ukrainian digital farm was using PS4s to farm cryptocurrency, a rare but not wholly uncommon sight. However, a closer inspection of photos from the farm made clear the consoles were PS4 Slims, which are much worse for farming cryptocurrency. With that in mind, some noticed that many of the PS4 Slims had discs sitting in their disc slots. However, it was difficult to tell what the discs were actually for.
Delo.ua was able to investigate the matter further, questioning an unnamed source regarding the PS4 Slims and the games they were running. The source described the farm using a "leveling bot" for FIFA and then "selling them." Perhaps something is lost in translation, but the message comes across as a very general description of what could have been happening, as opposed to a literal explanation for how the farm was using consoles to use FIFA games to earn money.
There are many ways that FIFA could be used to farm money, of course. The most fitting explanation would be selling FIFA Ultimate Team accounts. Since individual players can't be traded in Ultimate Team, there's a huge market for new accounts with valuable players already unlocked on them. Alternatively, the PS4 Slims could be farming FUT Coin, FIFA's currency. It may not be as lucrative as Bitcoin, but it can be farmed on PS4 Slims rather than $1,000 GPUs.
The intricacies of how the digital farm manages thousands of PS4 Slims, each independently running FIFA, are unclear. The basic idea is that PCs are used to run bots, which then control how each console farms currency or FIFA Ultimate Team packs. It had to have been a lot of work to manage.
It just goes to show what kind of economy Electronic Arts has created around FIFA and its other sports games. It has made earning FIFA currency and in-game content so frustrating to earn that there's a market comparable to cryptocurrency mining thriving on selling these digital products to players.
FIFA 22 releases October 1 on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.