Won't be coming to PC
very disappoited.
Forum Discussion
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
Community ManagerThis has been very heavily discussed over the last few years. The TLDR is that, contrary to popular belief, there just isn't a big enough audience for it. Yes, we fully understand you and your friends would play. That's awesome, but we would need a much higher amount of PC hockey players to warrant the very high cost of this. Porting the game to PC is probably the easier part. Combine that with building an infrastructure to support it and those costs skyrocket. Not to mention, all that work that goes in to this means the far more popular console versions wouldn't get the attention they need with all those resources devoted to a PC version.
We all are die hard hockey fans, but it also doesn't have the worldwide fandom of a sport like soccer. This is reflected as well in the amount of PC video game hockey players. It would take a pretty extraordinary amount of them to make the very big job of bring the game to PC not be a loss.
@EA_Aljo
https://forums.ea.com/en/nhl/discussion/232329/ea-nhl-sales-end-of-hockey-gaming
This shows that ea sells 100-300k copies of their nhl game a year.
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/05/22/tape-to-tape-revenue-marketing-steam-hockey-game
this link shows a new hockey game, from a developer no one knows, with no marketing budget, and not licensed sold over 34,000 copes in the first 8 days it launched on pc.
now please EA community managers, explain to me again how there isn't a market for hockey games on pc. I used to buy NHL every year for consoles, I stopped at 22. I will not buy another console just to play hockey. get with the times.
https://forums.ea.com/en/nhl/discussion/232329/ea-nhl-sales-end-of-hockey-gaming
This shows that ea sells 100-300k copies of their nhl game a year.
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/05/22/tape-to-tape-revenue-marketing-steam-hockey-game
this link shows a new hockey game, from a developer no one knows, with no marketing budget, and not licensed sold over 34,000 copes in the first 8 days it launched on pc.
now please EA community managers, explain to me again how there isn't a market for hockey games on pc. I used to buy NHL every year for consoles, I stopped at 22. I will not buy another console just to play hockey. get with the times.
Tape to Tape also sold for much less per copy and had a massive drop off in players soon after launch. Assuming your numbers are correct, you're gonna need wayyyyy more than 10% of the community demanding a PC port.
EA said it...
The PC player base is just not there. They have to focus where the money is like Super Mega Baseball 4 (released on ALL platforms) with a whopping 500-player all-time peak (steam charts). NHL just can't compete with that, the game is just too niche
