And yet, that's the core of the piece, and that core is pretty well articulated and damning.
Edit: I just want to add that on a personal level, I avoid any game with these manipulative elements in them. I love the idea of for example, For Honor, but the mechanics are perfectly tuned to abuse the player. Who has time in their life for that nonsense?
I'll just play another CDPR game.
Basically, if you (not YOU you, but rather the impersonal 'you') want to have a discussion about the morals and ethics of loot boxes, fine, but don't try to back it up with false claims. Using numbers in a moral argument fools everybody into thinking that there's more certainty around the situation than there actually is. At best it's misleading and at worst it's malicious and dishonest.
Edit: Just to add a quote from the article, Note: I’m going by the claims of the video. I still haven’t dug into the EA financials myself.
So lets do some in the article.
"In 2012, about 17% of EA’s revenue came from stuff like loot boxes and season passes. This year, about 45% of their revenue did."
That paragraph talks about revenue, while this paragraph discusses profit;
"In 2012, EA made $76 million dollars, and in 2017 they made $976 million. The kicker is that we know $800 million of that comes from FIFA, which means all the rest of their games combined earned the other $197 million."
EA's revenue at the end of the last fiscal year was nearly five billion dollars. I do believe the $800m quote about FIFA is correct, but that puts it at around 20% of total revenue, not the 80% or so this article asserts.
Don't ever assume that Some Random Guy On Youtube has his numbers correct. If CGP Grey (or someone as respected) does a video about this, he/they will probably get it right, but I don't trust many others to do this kind of analysis without getting the numbers wrong.
To further highlight the silliness of the original video, it includes some assertions about the cost of game development - EA has claimed it's going up, the author notes that EA's publicly available R&D expenses have gone down in the last four years, therefore the cost of developing games has gone down. This is a completely false claim, because the number of games EA has released has gone from 20+ per year to less than 10. The cost per game has gone way, way up.
(I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.)