Seventy percent off. Eighteen thousand reviews. Forty-seven percent positive. The math on EA Sports FC 26 tells you everything about the state of annual sports games.

EA’s football sim just hit its deepest discount yet, dropping from $69.99 to $20.99 across Steam and the PlayStation Store. According to Soccer Gaming, the sale follows February’s 60% cut, which coincidentally arrived after community backlash over Ultimate Team’s Team of the Year campaign. The previous installment, FC 25, eventually hit 80% off during last year’s Steam Summer Sale — suggesting the current price is less a gift than a waypoint on the road to giving the thing away.

And yet. Fifty thousand players are in-game right now. FC 26 sits at #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. The discount is doing exactly what it was designed to do: flood the player base, keep Ultimate Team’s economy spinning, and let review sentiment sort itself out.

The reviews won’t sort themselves out. One player with 25 hours logged wrote that the game hasn’t meaningfully evolved since FIFA 21 — camera clipping bugs in celebration cutscenes, commentary stuck on the same two lines for years, and smaller clubs’ player names still unread by announcers. Another reports that sprint simply stops working mid-match. On EA’s own forums, a player documented an Ultimate Team match ending 11-9, calling the gameplay “arcade-y” and identifying broken defending AI and inconsistent goalkeepers as core problems that patches reshuffle rather than fix.

This is the EA FC playbook in its purest form. Ship at full price in September. Watch reviews settle into Mixed. Slash the price in stages. Ride the player surge to the next September release. The 9,720 negative reviews on Steam outnumber the 8,460 positive ones — and none of it matters while 50,000 people keep booting it up.

Sources