The excitement born of the return of college football in 2025 felt like a distant memory last week, as the release of College Football 27 was marred by the introduction of massive microtransactions. Those microtransactions have been removed, but the bad reviews that came with them remain.
Introduced to the series this year, instead of giving players the option to speed up their progress in Dynasty and Road to Glory, the latter of which is a single-player mode, it locked that option after a microtransaction costing as much as $149.99. This is the main reason why the game currently has mostly negative review scores on Steam.
That's a bad look for a recent college football title for a few reasons. For starters, it's the first game in the series to be released on PC, so it's not a first impression for fans who have been waiting for it to be available on anything other than consoles. Its user review score is also so low that it is currently one of the worst-rated games of the year, ranking 690th out of 704 games according to SteamDB.
Those bad reviews out and the viral backlash on social media were enough to make EA quickly reconsider their decision. Microtransactions in those modes have already been removed. The studio confirmed in a statement that starting Saturday they will no longer be part of the online version of Road to Glory or Dynasty.
That last one is Saturday, so by the time you read this, they'll already be gone.
College football fans have naturally been celebrating ever since, but there may be a catch. EA's takeaway from all of this was implementing microtransactions. There was no warning prior to launch, and those who played the game pre-release have claimed that the microtransaction options were not there.
EA notes in its statement that, starting with College Football 28 next year, it will “provide valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication.” This sounds very corporate-speak because we're going to try it again next year, but tell you about it first so you don't complain too hard. We will see.
Aside from forcing EA to back down, the other good news to take away from this is that, if you're loud enough about unnecessary practices in games, you can get even the big studios to reconsider. Maybe that means there's a future for physical PlayStation games after 2027, as long as those of us who want the PlayStation to have a physical future are screaming about it.
- issued
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July 9, 2027
- ESRB
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Everyone/users interact, in-game purchases (includes random items)
- developer(s)
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EA Tiburon
- Multiplayer
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Online co-op, local co-op, online multiplayer, local multiplayer
