The latest EA Sports College Football game has finally arrived, which is tantalizing news if you were excited for the series’ hotly anticipated comeback a couple years ago. Less tantalizing is the game’s reception, which so far has been marred by widespread backlash to its egregious microtransactions. Complaining works: in a post on X yesterday, the official CFB account said those microtransactions are out.
“Your feedback on Road to Glory and Dynasty is that we’ve missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options,” the statement reads. Notably, Road to Glory is a single-player mode (in a game that already costs $70)—a prominent point of contention amid the negative feedback.
“This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more choice … tomorrow morning, we will remove all paid progression options from Road to Glory and Online Dynasty.” That’s today, so if you were planning to dump some change into those modes, you may have missed your chance.
The backlash was led in part by YouTuber Bordeaux, who got the hashtag “#CFBPlayDontPay” trending on social media. In response to the statement from EA, he posted “we did it” with a clip from Breaking Bad: Walter White saying “I won.” Fans are generally elated—”Never let anyone tell you that organizing against giant corporations doesn’t do anything,” said Reddit user UnrealAce on a thread approaching 5,000 upvotes. “They tell you it doesn’t work so you don’t try because they KNOW that it works.”
“Organizing” might be a strong word given that EA folded in a matter of days and it’s not like anyone marched on the developer’s offices, but it’s hard to argue with the results. That said, it doesn’t necessarily seem like the beast is dead.
A line in EA’s post notes, “Our goal for live service plans in CFB28 and beyond will be to deliver valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication.” Given that and the lines stating EA “missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options … they’re not adding the value we intended,” the statement suggests the problem here was merely the rollout and not the notion of paid progression itself.
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