EA Sports FC 27 is now rated PEGI 16 in Europe. That’s a big jump for a series that has carried a PEGI 3 rating for as long as most players can remember. Nothing on the pitch changed. The new rating is about Ultimate Team packs, which PEGI now classes as “paid random items”.
FC 27 isn’t the only game affected. PEGI has started re-rating live games that sell loot boxes, and Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, Zenless Zone Zero, Pokémon Go and Mario Kart Tour have all moved up over the past fortnight.
What PEGI changed
PEGI announced new classification criteria back in March. From June, every newly submitted game was assessed against an expanded list of what PEGI calls interactive risks, which covers how a game sells to players as well as what appears on screen. Under the new rules, any game with paid random items gets PEGI 16 by default, and social casino games get PEGI 18.
The October step is the one players are noticing. Connor Hinde, policy manager at the Games Rating Authority, which runs PEGI in the UK, confirmed on LinkedIn that existing digital-only games rated PEGI 3, 7 or 12 that sell paid random items are being moved to “PEGI 16 – Paid random items”. According to Video Games Chronicle, the updates started the week of 12 October and will keep rolling out until the end of the month.
The same framework also sets lower ratings for other mechanics. Time-limited offers can push a game to PEGI 12, daily-quest systems to PEGI 7, and unrestricted chat or NFT purchases to PEGI 18, as TechPowerUp laid out.
Which games have moved so far
| Game | Old rating | New rating |
|---|---|---|
| EA Sports FC 27 | PEGI 3 | PEGI 16 |
| Marvel Rivals | PEGI 12 | PEGI 16 |
| Overwatch | PEGI 12 | PEGI 16 |
| Zenless Zone Zero | PEGI 12 | PEGI 16 |
| Warcraft Rumble | PEGI 7 | PEGI 16 |
Pokémon Go, Pokémon TCG Pocket and Mario Kart Tour have also been spotted with the new rating. Some game websites and storefronts still show the old label, because PEGI’s own database is updating first. Marvel Rivals switched on European storefronts on 17 October.
What it means if you play Ultimate Team
In practice, nothing in FC 27 itself changes. Packs, FC Points and the season pass are all still in the game, and PEGI hasn’t banned anything. The difference is the label on the box and the store page, and that label carries legal weight in countries that have written PEGI into law, the UK included, where selling a PEGI 16 game to an under-16 is an offence.
For parents, the “Paid random items” descriptor now says plainly what it means: the game sells items whose contents you don’t see before you pay. That’s the same reason Marvel Rivals players pushed back last year when data miners found loot box files in the Season 4 build.
The bigger picture
Europe isn’t alone. Belgium has treated paid loot boxes as gambling since 2018, and Brazil’s Ministry of Justice has just asked its regulator to look at loot boxes in Call of Duty, NBA 2K26 and Counter-Strike 2.
PEGI’s approach is lighter than a ban, but it hits the biggest games on the market, and it lands during FC 27’s first big Ultimate Team season. We’ll update this story as more games are re-rated before the end of October.