College Football 27 released on Steam earlier this week. It is the first time EA’s student athletics series has touched down on PC. On a meat and potatoes level, the game is considered one of the best so far, including the NCAA hayday. Despite that it has garnered an overwhelmingly negative reaction from players. This stems from, what else, unbecoming microtransaction practices, which add a price tag to features that were previously free. After several days of review bombing, EA has announced they will be dropping the paywall.
An update from the College Football 27 Team. #CFBGoPlay pic.twitter.com/00b4TZrlPR
— College Football 27 (@EASPORTSCollege) July 11, 2026
“Thank you for your continued passion and for the incredible response to College Football 27,” EA Sports posted in a statement. “Your feedback on Road to Glory and Dynasty is that we’ve missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options. This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more voice, but what you’ve said is that they’re not adding the value we intended.”
EA announced that they will be removing these “paid progression” features this weekend. The grievances stem from Road to Glory and Dynasty, two offline single-player modes, which previously allowed players to scale XP progression to their liking. Those expediting features have returned, but now ask players to cough up money, a progression structure commonly seen in free-to-play and mobile games. Less so full-priced games.
When fans caught wind of this decision, the negative Steam reviews began to pour in. “I’m nearly 40 years old, 2 kids, full time job,” writes one user review. “All I want to do is play a football game to distract myself from the horrors of reality…and EA throws microtransactions into offline game modes.”
As of this writing, 70% of reviews have tilted the game towards “Mostly Negative,” though the tide has already begun to shift in light of EA’s course correction. In their statement, EA promises “greater transparency and communication” with live service features in future entries of the College Football series. Of course, this also means that anyone who did purchase “College Football Points” before the change have been effectively snookered.
This is just the latest scandal with EA’s college football games, though a drop in the bucket compared to the NCAA likeness settlements a decade ago. These microtransactions are less likely to warrant a South Park episode, if only because they only seem to make like two a year.
