Unable to load up Madden on EA Play First Play Trial - Stuck on loading screen

Sadly, EA don't care.  The EA representatives on these forums, such as EA_Blueberry, aren't here to help the community, or get issues resolved.  They're here to give the appearance that EA care and that they will resolve issues.

To suggest this has become somewhat of a complete mess , would be an insult to a complete mess. Shocking behaviour from an alleged “big” publisher.

Totally agree with what was said above^. The game is probably coming to the vault anyway in a matter of weeks, so how much money is EA actually losing by giving affected players a free copy? If anything, EA would make more money if all these affected players had the game and could now spend $$$ on MUT packs and stuff.

@EA_Blueberry does this make you proud of your work that you've let this issue to go unfixed for 3 months? Look at all of these comments. If you can't be proud of your work, what can you be proud of? This is simply disrespectful to your customers at this point

Psn:  URI_RAMS2019

ive tried logging in daily since last week.  Ea help Twitter first sent me to Sony.  Sony sent me back to EA help. Sunday evening, EA help said a tech ticket was created.  2 days later and still no update from anyone.  1 hour trial time and countless personal hours spent trying to resolve this.  I’ll literally spend more time this month trying to play than actually gaming.  How sad is that?

As a shareholder and consumer I question the mentality / culture EA has around customer service.  Being an EA play or EA access etc member in my mind, shows that the individual truly is loyal to EA.  What do we get in return?  Absolutely nothing.  This is a known bug which has been affecting a considerable amount of players (based on the amount who actually went to the extent to come to this forum I can imagine there are hundreds).  This bug is only related to the trial version of Madden 21 and only affecting a key core group of loyal consumers.

Wouldn’t a great solution, considering this game is headed to the vault, to just give the affected players the full game unlimited play?  Instead of wasting the customer support and tech support lines to fix a minor bug and wasting the consumers time spent not playing or trying to troubleshoot, you just send them a code for madden 21.  By waiting until this point, most have proven that they’re going to wait for the vault anyways.  Additionally, they will have access to play MUT and EA can start cashing in on the micro transactions.  Seems like a great resolution to me!

 But no, instead we are sitting here without a resolution, without the ability to play the trial madden 21 (which we purchased through our membership), and with the feeling that once again EA has proven that they don’t care about consumer, only the money.  

I'm having the same issue on both my PS5 and Series X, in that I am unable to play the 10 hour trial on either system. The same exact malfunction is happening on both  - I open the game, if and when the game loads completely (most of the time it get stuck at about 80%) a message pops up saying EA servers are not available and all of the buttons on the home screen are unusable (I can click on them but nothing happens, even on the offline choices like exhibition). I've deleted and re-installed the game on both systems and continue to have the same issues.

Any suggestions on how to rectify this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

PSN ID: Cinna7

i play on ps5

it won’t let me pick any game modes and pops up saying connection issues at the start I click through. Can my hours be reset please? This isn’t fair

i last attempted 10:55pm UK time

Ok an update based off what I wrote yesterday.

I'm glad I got to play 3 hours last night but that sucks this solution no longer works.

Because now when you delete the save data and go back into the game the game freezes when the progress bar reaches 90%.

I tried reinstalling the game too. 

Now the game just crashes with an error report.

I can no longer even get into the main menu,

Hopefully it could be that they are working on it.

But for now it no longer works ☹️ 

OK so I found a fix that might help you guys.
After this wasn't working for me in the fall I decided I would try to give it one more chance since it was Super Bowl Sunday. With my luck it did work. I was going to keep it running while I watched the superbowl because I feared having the same issues as I did before, but I didn't want to loose 4 hours of my trial so I turned it off. But sadly once I turned it on all the connection issues returned not being able to click on anything in the main menu screen. I did delete the game along with all my data stored in the saved files and then reinstalled it. I still wasn't able to get it to work.  However, this was my fix: Note I don't know if this is a permanent fix but so far I am currently playing it one more time.

While the game is still running go to your playstation settings and playstation storage and open up your saved data and delete any files relating to madden 21. The application might restart doing this but when it loads up even if it says connection issues, just persist through those popups. When the main menu appears hopefully you will see a small menu appear on the bottom left that you didn't see the previous times...I think it was related to some sort of difficulty setting. Nontheless it should start up a video that will bring you to a Kansas City and Baltimore Ravens matchup where you are able to play the game. Also if this doesn't work the first time try these steps again since it might work. I am using a PS5 though.  EA hire me as a QA tester 🙂