When NHL 25 releases on October 4, it will only be available for the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 consoles. No PC version is planned for this year, and old-gen consoles are finally being abandoned.
We’ve seen EA Sports College Football 25 go the current-gen only route, but this would be the first sign from EA that its legacy sports games are starting to move on from last-gen consoles. FIFA and Madden are obviously much bigger games with much larger install bases so it’s probably harder to walk away from those last-gen sales, but NHL 25 going this route could be a sign we’re entering the final year of old-gen support.
There’s been a debate the last couple years about what old-gen support means and whether or not it’s holding back games from a tech standpoint. If these sports games have to worry about memory and the like on old-gen consoles, is it hampering what developers want to do with things like graphics and AI? It’s hard to know without companies like EA more directly commenting on the topic, but the game development process certainly has to be easier with fewer hardware questions to worry about.
As for what NHL 25 is getting by going this route, EA did not directly comment on that to this point. There is some new graphical tech being utilized this year (Sapien Technology), and there’s a major focus on upgrading the AI, but we don’t know if things like that have anything specifically to do with ditching the old consoles.
We have plenty of NHL 25 news hitting today, and we’ll update this story if EA comments further on the reasoning behind going to a current-gen only approach this year.
