No guarantees but I think it might make a return once they finally ditch old gen and sort of start fresh with their code.
They say "Absense makes the heart grow fonder"; it certainly wasn't popular before but everyone seems to want it back now
It wasn't popular before because it was done very poorly and half the time was so broken you couldn't even connect to the league, let alone finish a game before getting dropped.
It was a master class in how to ensure a game modes failure.
@TTZ_Dipsy wrote:it certainly wasn't popular before but everyone seems to want it back now
It was actually so popular that the servers they used to host all of the server-side data were slowed to a crawl. People eventually stopped using the mode that was incredibly cumbersome and EA just decided, "welp, guess nobody likes it".
HUT was introduced in NHL 11. GM Connected came on board in NHL 13. IMO, the financial success of HUT combined with the incorrect assessment that nobody played GMC (which some of us KNEW was due to overloaded servers) resulted in the mode being axed.
The stagnation of BAP in '23 makes me think they're pumping resources elsewhere - likely crossplay and HUT - but we might get lucky with some kind of online mode being added to Franchise in '24. Especially once they no longer need to develop for last-gen.
