17th year without a PC release

EA presently, doesnt have a contractual agreement with the olympic commitee. So no olympic segment.

Even our President had the NHL Olympic gold team in the white house and we can't even play Olympic hockey because of EA's greed.

I would only play this for this already tbh, wanted to play NHL for a long while. Just never was available on PC :/ and i know cloud gaming is a thing but im not paying 30 a month just for this.

they could release version with offline regimes (franchise, be a pro, friendly match) and watch how many people would play. 100% that amount of people who want to play NHL in Steam would be big. I would buy even this version tbh

With EA Nhl losing money over the past several years. They look at it this way. If we diversify to a PC version. How much of the console based game would be lost. Sales as they stand right now, are based off two consoles. Xbox and PS. With the revenue stream, decreasing. Would adding another platform be beneficial financially. And unfortunately, they feel it is not worth the financial risk. Which i wholly disagree with. If they create a PC version. It opens the door to more potential customers. And does it really matter where your revenue is coming from, as long as it is in the black financially. Perhaps they should have their marketing people do a more indepth survey regarding the desire for a PC version.

Regarding the PC version. A number of years ago, EA did have a PC version. And the game was modded by others on line. However, it dIdnt stop them from still putting it out. What did is. The advant of the modified console. Before the game was limited to the consoles harddrive. Small amount of GB space. Now with Microsoft and Sony bringing out new consoles with bigger harddrives, they turned to the game, now being exclusively on consoles. They see the consoles of today, being like small computers, with TBs now instead of GBs. Also. Competition for the game, (NHL), dwindled, leaving them the sole producer. Unfortunately. EA looks at a PC version as being, limited, financially. And since there has never been a concensus on how many would buy the PC version. It remains in Limbo. Personally. I loved the old PC version. You had other gamers moding arenas, equipment, face plates. There was more realism from that. I think EA  is doing itself an injustice, by not looking into revamping the PC version. Their sales have dropped over the past several years, and their position on the sports game survey, also shows them closer to the bottom. Im with you in wanting to see the PC return. But the question is. Will EA do it. My guess would be.....NADA! UNFORTUNATELY.

Not enough players for pc version. They have data of other ea games like fifa how much it has pc players compared to console. Some other reasons server costs and cheaters on pc. 

Please EA Sports.. please! For the love of all that is holy - let me give you my money so I can play hockey on my PC!!!

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. 

Regarding putting this game on PC. They would have to expand their licensing and server support. Right now two things stand in the way. Their desire to do so. And the viability of it being worthwhile financially. And i dont believe they see the return to PC as a financial asset. They use to have a PC version many years ago. But when consoles expanded, like they have today, with computer like qualities. They went the route of the console version, and ditched the PC format. Personally. And i say this unfortunately as well. I dont think a PC version is in their future. Also. I dont think there has been a big enough concensus to validate a change in their thinking.