It was recently announced that the long-running FIFA series would be rebranded to EA Sports FC.  The rebrand comes on the heels of a financial terms disagreement between the FIFA governing body and Electronic Arts. While EA has stated that EA Sports FC will be the future of the sports franchise for the years to come, does that future include EA Sports FC being free-to-play?
Will EA Sports FC be Free to Play?
Last summer though there were rumblings in the FIFA community that the next game in the franchise would be free-to-play and that it would feature cross-play.  The rumor came just after the announcement that Konami would be taking their eFootball title and making it free-to-play. A well-known FIFA insider and leaker named Donk made the statement that the game would be free to play and crossplay. Unless something drastically turns in the next few months it doesn’t look like FIFA 23 is going to be free-to-play.
However, you can’t entirely rule out the possibility of some component being free-to-play in this year’s game. With Electronic Arts shedding the huge licensing fees to FIFA and renaming the game EA Sports FC, this could give the mega-publisher more room to maneuver when it comes to making EA Sports FC free-to-play.
Sure EA Could, But Will They?
FIFA fans are obviously conflicted on whether this is a possibility at all. Electronic Arts has had no problems whatsoever getting football fans to plunk down their yearly admission in the FIFA series each year, and have had no problems in further monetizing that player base with the game’s incredibly popular Ultimate Team mode.
While some think that it’s unthinkable for EA to do this with such a cash cow, it would ultimately be a question of how many new players they would get and how much each of those players would spend on Ultimate Team.
It’s not entirely out of the question for Electronic Arts to have both a free and premium tier of the game where players who purchased can play things like career and standard matches, while non-paying players would be resigned to playing a mode like Ultimate Team which tugs heavily on the purse strings.
Regardless, it’ll probably be quite some time until we get some concrete answers on whether EA Sports FC will be free.  FIFA 23 hasn’t even yet arrived, so it won’t be for another year + that we see the release of EA Sports FC.
EA Sports FC is slated for release in 2023.
