FIFA 14: A Game too High-Spec for PC Users

FIFA 14, in addition to most of EA’s other large sports titles, will not be available on the PC, EA Sports head Andrew Wilson states in an interview with Polygon. Now, we haven’t seen an EA Sports title, aside from the FIFA franchise, on the computer for a very long time, but the rational is baffling. EA asserts that PC users do not have the hardware to run any of the games their newest engine, EA Sports Ignite, supports. Even FIFA 11 was delayed from release on the PC, for a very similar reason:

“Even though there were some PCs on the marketplace that could run that engine FIFA 11’s engine], the lion’s share of PCs on the marketplace could not,”

The “lion’s share” could not? FIFA 11 ran pretty flawlessly on consoles running duo core processors and limited RAM. Based on Valve’s Steam survey for last month, over 42% of the computers are running at least 4 cores, and a total of over 95% are running at least a two core computer. FIFA 14, however, still is runnable by a large amount of the PC user-base.

Basically, if Crysis 3 and EA’s new Battlefield 4 can be run on recommended settings by a “lion’s share” of PC users, but FIFA 14 doesn’t run, then we’re talking about poor optimization by Electronic Arts, not poor specifications by the users. After hearing all of this, I’m really interested in seeing the benchmarks for XboxOne and PS4.

I’ll end this article with this.  Best of luck, EA.