17th year without a PC release
Yep, preorder site only shows PlayStation and Xbox. Huge let down EA, again.
Forum Discussion
It's 2025. Even sony is releasing their first party exclusives on PC. Companies reporting their profits growing fast on PC, often PC sales beating both consoles combined. Why NHL isn't on PC is beyond comprehension. There's no competition so literally everyone who wants a hockey game would buy it,
Just go look at the steam analytics for Madden since they started putting it on PC… and that playerbase is bigger than NHLs. That’s why they won’t do it. Also 8000 signatures is a lot different than 8000 preorders. One you are just saying I am interested the other is actually putting money down not knowing how it will turn out.
Side note: We are not even counting this factor. How many of those 8000 are people who are still buying the console version every year so it is not an increase in any sales but just someone who is switching where they play the game?
It's actually hilarious to me this signature campaign from nearly a decade ago is the only anchor point we have for any evidence. It's funny, because it completely exposes the absolute laziness of EA Sports to not even attempt to engage with the PC community at all. Yes, we have a change campaign with 8,000 signatures. That is only indicative of the people who were actively looking for a PC release at the time who managed to find this forum, login, search through comments on an outdated forum post, click through to the campaign link and then sign with an email. So from my view, 8,000 signatures is actually a great number for something that basically had to be discovered through effort and curiosity.
This forum itself is a small echo-chamber. You have larger social communities on reddit, and even bigger ones on instagram, facebook, youtube comments, etc. All of which you will see chatter about a pc version. So really I don't understand why the onus is on the pc community to basically put all of this energy to "prove" to EA that it's worth it with what, what is the number - 10K signatures? 100K signatures? 1 million signatures? It's ridiculous - the onus should be on EA Sports to clearly communicate and at least show it is trying to engage. But we get nothing. Zilch. It just feels like we've been ignored now for over a decade, and it feels that way because it is that way. There are freely available resources online that show the pc platform is as large as the entire console market combined.
Like I said, I respect the community mods for responding but most of the people who were asking for this nearly 15 years ago have either moved on or stopped caring all together. It is extremely difficult to get any read on this situation other than general sentiment online, which btw clearly states: yes, people want this game on PC and other platforms like Switch. Soooo yeah.
I asked EA Sports to open source the server code/game code for NHL Legacy so at least the PC community can have some variation of modern NHL available to them. There are dedicated groups attempting to reverse engineer this stuff so we can at least play the game on PC. The will is there on one side, but it's definitely lacking, and basically non-existent on EA Sports side. Again, I am sorry to be so negative but it is beyond frustrating at this point."the onus should be on EA Sports to clearly communicate and at least show it is trying to engage. But we get nothing. Zilch."
That's just the thing. No shade to AJ or the other community managers, but I wonder how much of the "thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it along" just gets thrown into an empty email that the devs don't bother checking. There's been TONS of genuinely great feedback that would greatly improve the games from a consumer standpoint, most of which never see the light of day.
There's no competitor for NHL games. So EA is allowed to sit on their hands, updating one offline game mode per release, because nobody will challenge them.
They've said it will cost too much money, but they aren't factoring that PC gaming isn't like it used to be. It's not dead in the water like it was in the mid 2000's to 2010's. There is a whole untapped market out there just sitting, waiting to be able to play the game but won't, because EA needs to meet their sales/micro-transaction quota with overpriced HUT cards that will be irrelevant in 6-8 months.
AJ has also claimed they don't release sales numbers, which is a good indication they are garbage. Companies love boasting when they have great sales numbers. Looks good for future potential investors.
It doesn't help that they probably aren't getting a ton of investor money, but maybe they just suck at sales pitches, lol. EA was just bought by the Saudi's, tons of Oil Prince money waiting to be invested. Do better
There's been TONS of genuinely great feedback that would greatly improve the games from a consumer standpoint, most of which never see the light of day.
That's just not fair. A lot of "feedback" here is just "make X better" or "make X more realistic".
EA definitely keeps all the feedback. Many years ago, I had the chance to visit the studio and at one point we were shown an internal platform used by the team to track all feedback. Basically a software they use to track all of the ideas the community and others had for the game along with progress in terms of implementation.
But again, there's a lot of 'feedback' here that isn't really feedback and more just an airing of grievances after a loss.
So EA is allowed to sit on their hands, updating one offline game mode per release, because nobody will challenge them.
I agree with this. Needs to be more competition in the market, but it's expensive and difficult to make quality games these days. You need a high profile publisher to pay the NHL licensing fees or an indie developer willing to tackle the sport. There's a promising game called 'Puck' on PC that looks like a really fun time. I wish it would translate to consoles.
It's not dead in the water like it was in the mid 2000's to 2010's.
Nobody is saying the PC market is dead. EA has smart people to analyze markets and they've done the math; there's no ROI on a PC NHL game. You have to uplift so much infrastructure to support a PC release and there's just no market for it on the PC. A few hundred devoted forum members who religiously play PC doesn't equate to real-world market share.
AJ has also claimed they don't release sales numbers, which is a good indication they are garbage. Companies love boasting when they have great sales numbers. Looks good for future potential investors.
Why does it matter to you if EA's sales numbers are garbage? I never understood why some people put so much weight into how many copies of the game gets sold. I couldn't care less if EA sold 5,000 copies of the game. All I know is that there's always a ton of people to play against online and it's an active base of really good players. Being concerned about sales numbers just seems to weird to me.
It doesn't help that they probably aren't getting a ton of investor money, but maybe they just suck at sales pitches, lol. EA was just bought by the Saudi's, tons of Oil Prince money waiting to be invested. Do better
Again "do better". This is the "quality feedback" you think is being 'ignored'.
It doesn't sell great on consoles either. So it's a win win situation for everybody if it would be on PC. More money for EA and people can play NHL finally.
Porting the game would cost pennies. And the market is bigger than NFL. No one outside USA cares about NFL and americans prefer consoles over PC's. While ice hockey is popular worldwide. Same with basketball. NBA 2k is selling like crazy on PC. By cancelling NBA live on PC EA basically said no to 300-500million bucks. Now NHL of course is much less popular sport in general but even if it can only generate 50mil/year it would be a huge win.
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