EA (like many other companies) doesn't truly have an accurate way to pulse the community when it comes to measuring demand for a PC market. EA also needs to consider the upfront cost of expanding to a platform like PC, as well as maintaining it and releasing new games on it year over year. Does EA think that, year over year, there is a strong enough market for PC players right now that will continuously buy the PC port of NHL? Probably not, but there's no true way to determine that until it happens, and if there truly wasn't a big enough market, its a waste of already limited resources for the NHL team. Remember that NHL for PC only became a thing last year (NHL 24), so when it comes to cloud gaming this year EA can probably determine how much of the cloud gaming fanbase returns for NHL 25. I think cloud gaming is a great way to see just how many players play on a platform other than Xbox console and Playstation, and it is relatively cheap considering a whole new team isn't required to develop NHL for PC. It enables PC players (through an Xbox subscription) to play NHL with the lowest amount of resources. NHL is becoming more popular though, so maybe in a few years EA might feel a bit more comfortable bringing the game natively to PC. But until then, I think from both a business perspective and a community perspective, cloud gaming is the best bridge for EA to utilize to get NHL available on PC without straining resources doing so.
If it matters, I've been on these forums since NHL 18 asking for a PC port, I'm not one of those console players who believe the world revolves around only them and think anything to do with a PC release will make this game unplayable. But remember NHL the game is much smaller than its sister games like Madden and FC, so we really cannot compare this game to those games until the numbers get a bit closer. It is a bit more realistic to ask that EA consider reducing the wait time for the NHL game to be placed on cloud - for example, why not in February for the all-star break? PC NHL players will have no way to play NHL 25 and will be stuck on NHL 24 (as I am). I understand the whole "6 month/playoff" wait time but considering we don't have a PC port at all, making the game available for cloud gaming sooner seems like a more fair compromise.
Thank you, this is a good response. I've always assumed there was an issue either in collecting data on demand (therefore making port development a risky endeavour) or in a lack of demand itself, so I do think the cloud is a great service in the meantime that can possibly be used to help measure it. Agree 100% that the 6 month wait time could/should be shortened as a compromise, hopefully for the future releases this might be something they would consider.
