17th year without a PC release

I think most if not all of us can agree that the whole "market is too small" is complete nonsense. With the amount of people petitioning in years past and people still begging EA to make it a release on PC yet they still refuse to do so. Yeah streaming it on cloud gaming(which to my knowledge is not yet available for 26 as of this writing) is an option but the game comes out in September, it's almost March and still isn't available to stream and honestly while streaming the game is better than I thought when I streamed 24, it's still streaming the game and so obviously lag is an issue.

I firmly believe one of the biggest reasons we don't see it released on PC is EA fears the modding community. They know once they release it on PC and the modders get ahold of it, they will turn EA's mediocre idea of what hockey is and turn it on it's head. In doing so it would virtually guarantee no new sales of following years. That's the one reason that makes the most sense. You don't see Madden being modded all that much which is no surprise since player numbers in that game have dwindled. The fact you can play in club and league games on Chel where every position is filled by an actual player along with the passion of hockey fans makes Chel a more favorable choice. I've played it on XBOX since 2014 and I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it sure seemed like there were alot more people playing Chel. Sure the drop-in community took a hit in the volume of players but that has an ebb and flow feel to it. Some years there's more, others less but at some point will rebound but I don't even think it matters all that much since Club is where you go to find the real competitive games.  Release it on PC with cross platform and this game would kill it. Soccer is fun but to me having so many Ai on the field takes away from what it could be. Not so with Chel. The casual gamer would be also more likely to play hockey over soccer, I mean cmon it's the one sport where fighting occurs regularly and is just part of the game. Now add the ability to mod it, not having to see the same helicopter on a mountain year after year, graphic updates, Ai tuning, better penalty calling, the list goes on and on and we end up with what we as the consumer have always wanted. Even if modding weren't a possibility, bringing it to PC would bring in so many more players, add it to Steam Deck as well and it's an overnight success. 

I had bought an Xbox Series X just to play Chel. Only reason I bought it, played Chel 25 and by last summer I got sick of just having this extra console collecting dust if I wasn't play hockey so I gave it to my daughter and her boyfriend. It's sucked without playing hockey this year but I'll be damned if I go buy another Xbox and why should I when Pc has all the capabilities to run the game and the next Xbox will end up being tied in with Windows anyways. I'm sure there will be alot of disagreements with what I said and that's fine, we are all entitled to our opinions and I'd honestly be interested in what others could come up with for reasons why EA just walls off the PC players. This wasn't a bash EA post either but it's honestly real difficult to have anything positive to say. They own all the rights which is complete bullsh*t but I'm still pretty surprised another company hasn't tried to make a hockey game. The fan base is there, just look at the Olympics with the US vs Canada gold medal game, drew an average of 27.6 million viewers. In Canada it was around 16 million. And the game started at 8am EST on a Sunday...

Cmon EA, do the right thing and make the game available to all platforms for 27, with a release date for all platforms on the same day.