EA Looks to Tackle Future FIFA Hacks

After the release of FIFA ’12 last year, Xbox gamers saw what seemed like a crazy-huge rise in shady activity on their accounts, with many users reporting having had their accounts hijacked and sold in the name of FIFA-related DLC. Overall, it seemed as though there was a lot of dirty dealing going on regarding XBLA users and FIFA, to such an extent that the term “FIFA hacks” became pretty common parlance shortly after the game came out.

This year, however, publisher Electronic Arts has plans to make sure no one talks about “FIFA hacks” for FIFA ’13. EA Games president Frank Gibeau talked to Joystiq about the company’s plans moving forward at Gamescom last week:

“We learned a lot from the experience. A lot of companies are suffering from this right now. There’s a lot of sophisticated hacking happening in the gaming industry and it’s a continuous battle. We take it very seriously, put a lot of resources on it. The learning from the FIFA example last year has been incorporated this year. There’s some incremental and additional things. I don’t want to get too detailed because I don’t want to tip our hand. Rest assured, we take it very seriously.

You’re never going to win this battle. The moment you declare victory, somebody will walk in and show you didn’t. So you have to continuously stay on top of it and, most importantly, keep account integrity the first and foremost issue.”

If nothing else, it’s good that the company’s acknowledging that there was a problem, since I seem to recall that there was a lot of finger-pointing and buck-passing last year between EA and Microsoft. Maybe gamers will feel a bit more secure this time around…even still, it’s a good idea to cycle your passwords every time a new FIFA game comes out. It’s just common sense.

Via Joystiq