EA's FIFA 23 anti-cheat solution appears to be causing some consternation among PC players. The game is being review bombed on PC, with many players complaining of anti-cheat errors that are causing the game to crash, as well as more general performance issues.
FIFA 23 will be EA's final FIFA game before the franchise is renamed to EA Sports FC next year. With that in mind, the game looks like a rather inauspicious end to EA's time with the franchise, at least on PC. Right now, FIFA 23 is sitting at a rather disappointing "Mostly Negative" on Steam.
So, why is the game doing so poorly on PC? The main reason appears to be the FIFA 23 anti-cheat solution EA is using. Players say they're getting error messages related to the anti-cheat, and that these errors are causing their game to crash or not to start up in the first place.
Some players are saying that they've managed to fix the anti-cheat errors, suggesting various fixes including uninstalling the anti-cheat software and running Steam or Origin as admin. Others, however, are saying that they've spent hours trying to fix their anti-cheat errors to no avail. At any rate, nobody in the Steam reviews appears to have come up with a definitive fix for the problem.
It's not just anti-cheat problems, though. Other players are reporting poor optimization for FIFA 23 on PC, with bad performance even on high-end graphics cards. It looks like EA has its work cut out for it when it comes to making FIFA 23 work properly on PC, and it might take more than a few patches to sort this one out.
Generally speaking, PC players and EA don't have a great relationship. Both Madden NFL 22 and Madden NFL 23 have been criticized by PC players for lacking features present on current-gen consoles (and that's when players aren't accusing EA of implementing low-effort roster updates and charging full price for them, to say nothing of microtransactions).
EA has an uphill battle ahead of it when it comes to restoring FIFA 23 PC players' faith. If the company wants to start raking in revenue from its popular Ultimate Team mode (which it evidently does), then it might do well to make sure that players can actually play the game first. We'll bring you more on the state of FIFA 23 on PC as we get it.
