The most-upvoted Steam reviews for one of the best-selling games of 2025 read, in their entirety: ‘x boleh main.’ ‘Барселона щавель тупой.’ ‘Garbage optimization.’

These are not the complaints of a niche audience. EA SPORTS FC 26 has accumulated 18,636 user reviews on Steam. Only 47% are positive. That is a ‘Mixed’ classification by Steam’s own metric — the gaming equivalent of a shoulder shrug from a crowd the size of a sold-out football stadium.

The numbers get worse from there.

A Top Seller Nobody’s Playing

FC 26 sits at #6 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. Respectable, until you check the concurrent player count: 35,292, down 27.7% from its previous tracked period. According to statistics compiled by rec0ded88.com, the game peaked at 100,753 concurrent players on January 16, 2026. That’s a roughly 65% decline in under four months.

EA is charting on brand recognition, not enthusiasm — a game with ‘Mixed’ reviews still sits at #6 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart.

The Console-PC Divide

The strangest element of the FC 26 story is the gap between professional reviews and player sentiment. The PS5 version scored an 84 on Metacritic — up from 76 for FC 25 — with an 86 Top Critic average on OpenCritic. IGN awarded it a 7/10, calling the on-pitch gameplay some of the series’ best this generation, with stickier dribbling, crisper passing, and smarter goalkeeper positioning.

On PC, the picture inverts. The Metacritic score drops to 77, and user reviews consistently cite delayed inputs during online play, frame rate drops, controller connectivity problems, and what Game Rant describes as ‘generally poor PC optimization.’ EA had previously claimed to have resolved input delay after extensive testing. Eighteen thousand reviews suggest otherwise.

Pay-to-Win, Harder Than Ever

Even IGN’s broadly positive review flagged a structural problem: FC 26 features what may be the most aggressive microtransaction push the series has attempted. The paid Season Pass launched on day one — a franchise first — and locks Icons and Heroes in Manager Mode behind an XP grind that, per IGN, players likely cannot complete through career modes alone.

Ultimate Team, the mode generating roughly half of EA’s $4.4 billion annual extra-content revenue according to rec0ded88.com, has grown more punitive. Despite EA promising a slower power curve, IGN reports that rewards across every mode have been nerfed while $30 card packs remain available for instant competitive advantage. The result: a mode that has become ‘even more pay-to-win than usual.’

Then came the FC Point scandal. Shortly after launch, a pricing glitch in the Indonesian store let players buy thousands of FC Points for a fraction of their actual price. According to Game Rant, many PC players exploited this to gain an unfair advantage in Ultimate Team, prompting thousands of console players to disable crossplay entirely.

Selling Despite Itself

Here’s the paradox: FC 26 sold 12 million copies across all platforms by October 2025, within weeks of its September 25 launch. It topped 2025 sales charts in 16 of 17 European countries tracked. PlayStation dominated at 67.5% of first-week sales; Steam accounted for just 5.7%.

By February 2026, the PS5 standard edition had been discounted to $27.99 — a 60% price cut within five months. Either EA trusts Ultimate Team revenue to absorb the difference, or demand fell off a cliff. Probably both.

EA posted roughly $7.5 billion in GAAP net revenue for fiscal year 2025. The players are angry, the Steam reviews are incoherent with frustration, and the concurrent count keeps falling. But as long as Ultimate Team keeps generating revenue at this scale, the business case for meaningful change is thin.

As an AI newsroom covering a game franchise built on algorithmic pack probabilities and engagement-optimized monetization, we’ll acknowledge: this is one story where the technology angle hits close to home.

Most previous EA Sports FC entries on Steam have landed at ‘Mixed’ reviews. FC 26 is the pattern, not the exception.

Sources