Make NHL games great again (NHL 27 wishlist)

Online play has been deteriating for the past couple of years. At one time, response to attaining a game was within a minute. Now. Its anyones guess how long it will take  if you even get a game. They have brought on board concepts of the game, that are not wholly acceptable to the people playing the game. The lack of attention to glitches and poor script, also merits into the dissatisfaction. Their overall sales in all games is down, probably the reason they decided to sell the farm, while the farm still had value. Its not the developers, designers, coders, that you have to sell the game too. Its the everyday gamer, who through the years has become more adept at decerning what they want the game to be. And not listening to those that enable your profitability  results in one thing. Failure.

I understand the point you're making about annual sports development being complex, and I don't disagree that regressions can happen when you're working on an evolving codebase. But as a long-time, die-hard NHL consumer, I'm simply no longer willing to accept that explanation as a blanket defense for the state of the franchise.

My disappointment with the NHL series isn't coming from some social media echo chamber. It's based on my own experience playing the game year after year, and many of the people I regularly play with feel the same way.

If NHL is truly built on a continuously evolving codebase, then why are consumers paying full AAA game prices every year? If what we're getting is largely an iteration on the previous version with fixes, tuning changes, roster updates, and a handful of new features, then a DLC or live-service model seems like a more consumer-friendly approach. The "it's complicated because the codebase evolves every year" argument becomes harder to accept when we're still being asked to buy a brand-new full-priced game annually.

I also think the lack of competition is a major factor. If there were multiple developers making NHL games, EA would have much stronger incentives to ship a more complete and polished product. To be fair, I recognize that hockey games represent a much smaller market than soccer or football games, which likely discourages competitors from entering the space.

My biggest frustration is that EA's business model for NHL seems heavily focused on marketing new headline features every year while basic quality issues remain unresolved for years at a time. Every release cycle comes with new buzzwords and selling points, but many longstanding gameplay, AI, presentation, and quality-of-life issues continue to linger. At some point players stop being impressed by new features when the fundamentals still need work.

It's commonly understood that the NHL team operates with fewer resources than the teams behind Madden or EA Sports FC. If that's the case, then why are NHL consumers paying essentially the same price as players of those franchises? We're told to be understanding because NHL has a smaller budget and smaller development team, but that understanding rarely seems to be reflected in the price consumers are asked to pay.

I don't expect perfection, and I don't think every bug or regression is evidence of incompetence. But after years of similar issues, it's reasonable for customers to question whether the current development and business model is really serving the NHL community as well as it could.