EA Sports has recently announced that it plans to introduce a new update system, called Adidas Live Season, which should bring the characteristics of the in-game players in line with those of real life players. The service will have a subscription price which is not yet determined and will cover the most important leagues present in FIFA 2009.

It seems that the Live Season service will gather player data as it is provided by the same soccer experts who now determine the initial stats of the players. They will now watch the players perform on the pitch and rate their appearances as being bad, poor, neutral, good or excellent. Based on the centralized ratings, the attributes will be modified by the update service from EA Sports.

Those players who get injured or are suspended in real life will not be taken out of the game, but a reduction in their stats might be observed by players. The developers will also offer an option to roll back the changes made to players by way of Live Season so that players can play a truly "what if?" season without any interference from the real world.

I can only add my voice to the growing number of people who are saying that maybe the whole FIFA series of games should be turned into something entirely different. Instead of receiving a new game every year with updated stats for players, some graphical improvements and a few minor changes to gameplay, maybe we should be able to get a disk containing the game structure while downloading databases of players and gameplay modes that we would be able to mix and match to create our own football experience. A good digital distribution service, similar to Live Season, could then make sure that our game is up to date while eliminating the hassle and the cost of getting another game disk every year.