17th year without a PC release
Yep, preorder site only shows PlayStation and Xbox. Huge let down EA, again.
Forum Discussion
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were actively looking for a PC release at the time who managed to find this forum, login, search through comments on an outdated forum post, click through to the campaign link and then sign with an email.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'.
But again, there's a lot of 'feedback' here that isn't really feedback and more just an airing of grievances after a loss.
I agree but there is still a lot of quality feedback, which I think gets drowned out by the amount of grievances. But I do see some pretty in depth feedback that gets zero interaction by EA here. What others have touched on here is that there isn't a lot of engagement with all of the feedback, which understandably if Aljo is the only EA rep for their NHL series he can't possibly read and comment on every post.
Needs to be more competition in the market, but it's expensive and difficult to make quality games these days.
I agree with this as well, a lack of competition with hockey games likely reduces pressure on EA to innovate or take interest in the communities ideas. Most similar game I can see is 2KHS which is available on pc via patreon (last I checked), graphics are poorer but its something, from what I seen it brings back the broadcast vibes older versions of NHL had which I was a huge fan of. Being honest thats what I enjoyed the most about the older NHL games, just how much depth they went into making the game. Also something EA should change or refresh the community with is new broadcasters, we've had the same play by play dialogue for years and at this rate I can say exactly what Cheryl Pounder or James Cybulski is saying at the same time, its old and needs to be refreshed, even if they would only redo the dialogue every few years I would be happy about that.
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.
I think this is slept on heavily, you can look at PC games that are available on steam that are nowhere close to EA's NHL and they have tons of downloads and pretty decent active playerbases. Think a couple of the top games I seen was Slapshot Rebound and another called Puck which both are free, both are like first person low-poly hockey games. While I dont disagree that they may have people that run the numbers and do the math, I haven’t personally seen much public-facing outreach from EA about PC interest, so from the community side it feels like the demand has not been meaningfully tested or communicated. If they don't push out a PC version of NHL they should at least run a proper survey of the community to get full feedback. I'll provide some screenshots from the steamdb for the games I mentioned, I highlighted the estimated ownerships. Those numbers make me question whether the PC audience is really as nonexistent as people claim. I do not know EA’s costs, but I think it would be worth EA addressing why that audience is not considered viable. Now I don't know what their console sales are but its not just game sales we are talking about, there are in game transactions as well, and I'm not saying ownership of these steam games will turn into game sales for EA but it also shows there is definitely a big interest for hockey games on PC, Obviously this would not translate 1:1 into EA NHL sales, especially for a full-priced annual title, but just as a rough hypothetical, using those ownership estimates would put potential gross sales somewhere between roughly CDN$37 million and CDN$189 million before accounting for development costs, licensing, support, and other expenses.
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.
I have an interest in this as well as its the main argument used for defending denying a PC release by most people. A common argument, including one you mentioned, is that EA has likely run the numbers and does not see enough ROI. This is where people including me want some transparency, for me it goes with the timeline of the last PC title as well. its been so long since the games been on PC, we want to see the numbers people refer to that claim does not support a PC title. I understand EA likely won't release those numbers but even a good official explanation as to why a PC title isn't viable from EA would be sufficient.
I also see lots of people say just wait until its on gamepass but that's beyond the point of having a PC release. Waiting for gamepass means waiting for the games lifecycle to basically be in its last quarter, leaving anyone solely on PC to wait until around the time playoffs start IRL for the game to be accessible to gamepass subscribers or people who play via cloudplay, people that have to wait for this miss out on earlier WOC/Seasons and in NHL 26's case, will have a very steep learning curve with the gameplay changes with only months before the next title releases. An easy alternative to that would be making it cloudplay on release (not via gamepass), meaning people purchase the game then they can play on PC via cloudplay on release, this would be a good middle ground/compromise to a PC release despite Xbox's somewhat unreliable cloudplay service.
EA_AljoCommunity Manager
Hey. Just wanted to touch on this real quick:
I agree but there is still a lot of quality feedback, which I think gets drowned out by the amount of grievances. But I do see some pretty in depth feedback that gets zero interaction by EA here. What others have touched on here is that there isn't a lot of engagement with all of the feedback, which understandably if Aljo is the only EA rep for their NHL series he can't possibly read and comment on every post.
I try to at least let people know their feedback was seen. Obviously, not every message has been responded to. A lot of it is for modes I don't personally play so I don't have much to add to those. Which is why I normally just thank them for their input. While NHL is my primary forum, I'm also actively working other titles as well so my time here is pretty divided.
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