There have been a fair few posts about FIFA 13′s problems, but finally EA speak up. Not directly to the fans, but instead to Watchdog. They’ve published a copy of a letter sent to the BBC consumer protection program on their website.

We’ve summarised it below.

Helen Collins

Producer | Watchdog

Thank you for the opportunity to provide information related to FIFA 13 in the UK and your upcoming segment.

Our fans have engaged with FIFA 13 in record numbers. On any given day, more than 1 million online game sessions of FIFA are played by our fans in the UK. But as with any product or online service with such a high level of traffic and popularity, there will be some circumstances where fans experience challenges or issues.   And as with any online service, our game is also dependent on many other factors, such as online access and availability at the customer’s location, to ensure the best experience.

Since we released a major update to the game on October 19, we’ve seen reported game crashes and other issues drop by more than half.

We have received reports from our fans of rare occurrences where the ball in the game does not appear. Our team continues to investigate these rare events and we will communicate directly with our fans once we have more information.

Our commitment is to not only address issues and necessary fixes to improve the FIFA experience as quickly and effectively as possible, but deliver new services and new content all season long. The process of improving the game experience for our fans is a constant one, and our team continues to work on additional improvements that we will implement and communicate in the coming days and weeks ahead. We know that we have significantly improved the FIFA experience for our fans in recent days, and we fully expect that to continue as we develop and implement additional improvements and fixes.

We understand that some fans may wonder why we can’t fix all the known issues at once. That’s a fair question and the answer isn’t quite as simple. We are delivering improvements and fixes in such a way to ensure the millions of people playing FIFA 13 do not experience undue or overly lengthy network/server outages, that title updates and other improvements are done to a high quality, and that we’re confident the changes will improve the FIFA 13 experience for everyone.

We look at all enquiries an individual basis and are investigating the two cases you have brought to our attention, and will be in contact with them directly. Once again, thank you for the opportunity to provide this above information, and we welcome Watchdog to come over to the studio in Vancouver to see all the processes and procedures in place to ensure we’re delivering the best game possible for consumers.  Please do not hesitate to contact us for any clarification.

EA SPORTS

So there you have it. That’s the official stance on things. It’s interesting that crash reports have dropped by such a large amount, especially for CM because mine still doesn’t work after the patch. Which can only mean there are multiple causes. Not much explanation of how it launched in such a state either.

You can’t help but wonder if this would have been posted had Watchdog not been sniffing around. Although by all accounts the 2 segments featuring FIFA 13 were short and quite shit. I haven’t seen the second one yet.

You can read the letter in full on EA.com