Madden NFL 25 is rated'mixed" on Steam. This means that it's not worse than any Madden PC game.

Madden NFL 25 was released on Steam on 16 August, and it hasn't been well received. Poor performance, inadequate controller support and frequent crashes are some of the most common complaints. Despite all the negative reviews, there is one bright spot: it doesn't appear to be performing worse than any other Madden NFL games on Steam.

Currently, the Steam version of Madden NFL 25 has a "mixed user rating", with only 57% of user reviews being positive. Even in the positive reviews there is a lack of enthusiasm.

Steam user wrote: "It's Football." "It's a great game, especially after we were robbed by CFB/NCAA (College Football 25 which isn’t available on PC)." "I haven't had many complaints since I upgraded from [Madden NFL] 23 to '25, the new features are all pretty cool."

Another person called it "the best version in recent memory" but compared it with ordering a pizza at Little Caesars. "You eat because it's close to your home, and you just do it." You get a pie there every now and then, and you think, "Wow, it's still terrible, but it's better than usual."

Steam's concurrent player numbers are also not great: According to SteamDB's data, the number of players peaked at 4,380. This is a very low number for a game with Madden's popularity. It's not the entire Madden population, as it's also available in the Epic Games Store and on the EA App. But I think it's reasonable to say that Steam is the majority.

This is especially interesting, given EA's history of not releasing many of its most popular sports games on PC. In 2008, Peter Moore, former EA Sports chief, said (via the Wayback machine) that demand for sports games on PC was "declining rapidly" due to the growing popularity of consoles. The PC market in general was also rife in piracy. Madden NFL 19 marked the end of PC games for the series. It was the first game to be released on PC since Madden 2008.

While the Madden series was not available on PC, it was still available for years via Blackberry devices. What do you think of that?

It's tempting to question if Moore had it right. I don't believe the piracy argument is valid, but perhaps the "real" Madden audiences are on consoles. It's possible that PC versions of Madden games are not very good. As I'm not a Madden fan, I thought that this year's version was an anomaly. But it's actually in line with other games in the Madden series on Steam. Dare to compare

• Madden NFL 25: 57% positive user reviews, 4,380 peak concurrent player count
• Madden NFL 24: 46% positive user reviews, 9,526 peak concurrent player count
• Madden NFL 23: 54% positive user reviews, 6,169 peak concurrent player count
• Madden NFL 22: 57% positive user reviews, 5,602 peak concurrent player count
• Madden NFL 21: 50% positive user reviews, 3,226 peak concurrent player count

You may also remember that Madden NFL 24 is the first current-gen game to be released on PC in years. Prior to that, PC releases were ports of previous-gen console versions (PlayStation 4/Xbox One), and were therefore sub-par. EA doesn't seem to care that most Madden players prefer consoles over PC.