will NHL 24 be on PC this year?
I really wish this would come to PC. nice fan base here.
Forum Discussion
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
Community ManagerIt's been explained many times how there is a lot more than just porting the game and doing maintenance. You can read through all the threads to see these conversations. Supporting the game has a very high cost associated with it. This would also take attention away from the console version. Which is where the very high majority of people would be playing.
@EA_Aljo you mentioned in the other linked thread below "there is more to this than just porting and maintenance" could you please elaborate? what could possibly be more than that. You also have a research team spending time on this (seems like wasted effort)? I mean a quick estimate of unique players that have posted about nhl on pc is > 1000, while thats no number to write home about consider the % of players on console that dont post on the forum, or reddit, or youtube. Id even argue that lets say NHL didnt exist on console but it did on PC, the majority of players wouldnt care, i expect the same on pc. So just the people posting about nhl on pc are a small fraction of the people that would buy.
Id appreciate a breakdown of why this is such a burden to a multi billion dollar company. It quite literally is just one time cost of porting, maintenance, and additional servers proportionally. Everything else is shared. youre not retuning puck bounce per console
Id appreciate a breakdown of why this is such a burden to a multi billion dollar company. It quite literally is just one time cost of porting, maintenance, and additional servers proportionally. Everything else is shared. youre not retuning puck bounce per console
- EA_Aljo
Thanks for the input. I'm not involved in this so I don't have all the details why, but I assure you this has had thorough discussion by the team. If it were feasible to do and if there was a big enough audience to warrant all the work that goes in to bringing the game to PC, it would have been done.
Bringing the game to PC means moving the team off the console version to work strictly on the PC game. That, in itself, isn't a matter of copying the code to PC and calling it good. There would be a ton of testing and modifying of code involved. There needs to be infrastructure as well. PC servers need to be launched and crossplay needs to be added. Purchasing points needs to go through a different payment system than the Xbox/PS so that needs to be developed. We have to build support for advisors so they can assist with player issues. The majority of tech issues are from PC players and there's a big cost associated with supporting them. This also means a lot of documentation and policies get written to handle those. An anti-cheat system would also need to be built. Support for various controllers as well as making sure the game runs on a different PC set ups, different graphics cards, processors, etc. There could be licensing involved as well.
These are just a few of the tasks that would need to be done. Putting the console version on hold while we spend time and resources on a PC version that will have a fraction of the audience the console version has just isn't worth it in the end. I think a more realistic scenario is getting the game supported by a cloud gaming service where you can play the console version through a PC. I definitely get that it's easy to think moving the game to PC is a simple process, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Again, if it were worth it, it would have been done.
- @f308f9f718d1885e They would have to get the license to make the game for PC costing them more money.
They would need to hire a bunch more staff to maintain the game there. (PC is much tougher than a console with set configurations)
They usually gauge things from surveys and such to determine if it would be cost effective. (cost effective aka making profit is biggest thing. They aren't a charity looking to give away/lose money)
Also take into account that many of the potential people who might go to PC were already playing it on console so that isn't a new sale to them.
The modding community would make it so the offline stuff wouldn't really need more than 1 game. The online side of things would be fine though.
Cheating is so much easier on the PC side of things with being able to edit files and such which means they have to beef up protection costing them more time and money which is constantly evolved. @EA_Aljo@NeonSkyline21 No one knows how big the PC audience for an NHL title would be, because there is no NHL title on the PC. Estimates, projections, and speculation are ad hoc and unreliable, based on nothing substantive. For all we know, the PC version could sell more than both console versions combined, especially if someone like XQC were to stream it on Twitch. At this point, it's just conjecture.
