EA brought the Madden series back to PC in 2019, but it doesn't seem to have done a very good job of it.
Madden NFL 25 debuted on Steam on August 16, and it doesn’t seem to be going over very well. Common complaints include poor performance, inadequate controller support, and frequent crashes. There is one bright spot amidst all the upset, though: It doesn’t seem to be faring worse than any other Madden NFL game on Steam.
The Steam version of Madden NFL 25 currently holds a “mixed” user rating, with just 57% of the user reviews coming in positive. Even among the positive reviews, a certain lack of enthusiasm is detectable.
“It’s football,” one Steam user wrote. “It scratches the itch, especially since we were robbed of CFB/NCAA [College Football 25, which isn’t available on PC]. Going from [Madden NFL] ’23 to ’25 myself I don’t have many complaints, the new features are pretty cool and all.”
Another described it as “the best iteration in recent memory,” but compared it to ordering a pizza from Little Caesars. “You eat it because it’s familiar, close to your house, and it’s just something you do. Once in a while you get a pie from there and you think to yourself, ‘Wow, this is still crap but it’s definitely better than it normally is’.”
Concurrent player numbers on Steam aren’t great either: According to SteamDB, the concurrent player count peaked at 4,380, which seems awfully small for a series of Madden’s popularity. That’s not the entirety of the Madden population on PC—it’s also available on the Epic Games Store and the EA App—but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Steam very likely makes up the bulk of it.
That’s especially interesting because of EA’s long history of not releasing some of its biggest sports games on PC. Former EA Sports chief Peter Moore said in 2008 (via the Wayback Machine) that the demand for sports games on PC had “declined rapidly” in the face of growing console popularity, while the PC market as a whole was rife with piracy. For the Madden NFL series, that spelled the end of the games on PC for more than a decade: Madden NFL 19 was the first to come to PC since Madden 08.
(Ironically, although that might not be the proper word for it, while the Madden series was absent from PC it continued to be available for years on Blackberry devices. Make of that what you will.)
In light of that, it’s tempting to wonder if Moore was right. I don’t think the piracy argument holds water, but maybe the “real” Madden audience is on console. But maybe there’s a reason for that: Maybe it’s also possible that the PC versions of the Madden games just aren’t very good. Not being a Madden follower myself, I assumed at first that this year’s edition was an aberration, but in fact it’s perfectly in line with the other games in the series on Steam. Dare to compare:
Madden NFL 25: 57% positive user reviews, 4,380 peak concurrent player countMadden NFL 24: 46% positive user reviews, 9,526 peak concurrent player countMadden NFL 23: 54% positive user reviews, 6,169 peak concurrent player countMadden NFL 22: 57% positive user reviews, 5,602 peak concurrent player countMadden NFL 21: 50% positive user reviews, 3,226 peak concurrent player count
You might also recall that Madden NFL 24 was the first game in years to bring the current-gen version to PC: Prior to that, the PC releases had been ports of previous-gen (PlayStation 4/Xbox One) console versions, and were accordingly sub-par. So yeah, maybe most people who play Madden go for it on console rather than PC—and it sure doesn’t look like EA is overly interested in doing anything about it.
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