Won't be coming to PC
very disappoited.
Forum Discussion
One of my irritant is not being able to see where the profits go from the nhl game. EA reselling the same game each year, at triple A price, with the equivalent of a small expansion worth of content AND making a killing taking advantage of people with impulsive disorders in HUT mtx....
Where does that money go? My guess is in other products instead of back into its own product. If there was a desire to grow the population of the game, they could invest in it. But i dont see any sort of solid investment back in the product. Investment would be moving to pc, or adding more servers, or adding more yearly support/ patches to balance gameplay with meaningful changes..not just tuner adjustments.
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
Community ManagerThis game isn't exactly cheap to make. While you didn't see a lot of changes for 23, that's not the case for 24. I know people assume there's a skeleton crew of people making this game. In actuality, there's a pretty big team across various departments. Not to mention the cost of licensing, servers and supporting the game in general. Whatever idea you have in mind for that, it's far higher. This game isn't the copy and paste you all like to think it is.
- @EA_Aljo I totally always imagined a skeleton crew but perhaps what i see as skeleton crew you see as large team but in essence i imagine maybe 20 devs and 60 marketing folks 🙂 jk on marketing ppl.
But i get the licensing is likely gross but this was all there before hut and the money that brings in. Hopefully those revenues are injected back in the game.
Id love to see attempts at growing the products...more year long support, events and reach to other platforms.
Ill say one thing, many people cannot afford to buy a new console just to play one game like i do...and those ppl just dont play nhl as a result. Im not sure what sort of research can account for that group. @kezz123 What is wild to me is I haven't played this series since NHL 14 and I am still seeing many of the same animations still being used and for the most part the game looks exactly the same. In ten years there's been minimal change, and seeing people still mentioning how little the game changes year to year makes me laff.
It feels like it's tied to the idea of games as a live service instead of buy it and own it and see it supported for years to come. I know sportsball games will never move away from that but that is why PC is gaining in popularity lately.I also find it hilarious that these guys are still using the "We can't optimize the game for the endless hardware options of PC." While every other PC dev has figured out how to do it, 10 years on and EA still hasn't figured out how to optimize a game for PC hardware.
As for what you said about affording a console, honestly anyone who owns a gaming PC in 2023 has zero reason to even buy a console. Their PC can do anything the console can plus all of the things only a PC can do. Even to the point of "I just want to sit back and play games on my couch." PCs now can stream games to TVs and such well enough that there really is no reason to own a console if you already have a PC. I know people who don't own a computer who have consoles and we play the few cross-platform games we can but I'm always urging them to just make the jump.
Anyway I'm sure Andy Wilson could afford spare a few pence to fund a PC release of NHL.
All they really have to do is add HUT and WoC. Charge like $40usd and see how it does. Modes they could make continuous money off of and would have a solid playerbase to work with. We all know the offline community would just edit files and such for the offline modes thus making it not worthwhile to release new versions each year. But with the resets of HUT and WoC stuff they can push it forward each year.
- @EA_Aljo so we all know this game can't be on PC ...
You need dedicated servers, a launch platform , anti cheat , anti modification , blah blah blah.
We know once this hits PC everyone's gonna mod the game to their liking.
If this goes to PC , won't be a need for hut year after year, unless EA doesn't allow old versions on their server . Revenue down, that's a no go.
It will end up being someone with real life money, hosting chel, and everyone will abandon EA servers , and play project NHL .
EA will lose money , and they don't know how to protect themselves...
Let's no kid ourselves people.
