Madden NFL 25 stumbles out to a 'mixed' rating on Steam, which means it's no worse than any other Madden game on PC

Madden NFL 25 debuted on Steam on August 16, and it doesn't seem to be going over very well. Common complaints include poor performance, inadequate controller support, and frequent crashes. There is one bright spot amidst all the upset, though: It doesn't seem to be faring worse than any other Madden NFL game on Steam.

The Steam version of Madden NFL 25 currently holds a «mixed» user rating, with just 57% of the user reviews coming in positive. Even among the positive reviews, a certain lack of enthusiasm is detectable. 

«It's football,» one Steam user wrote. «It scratches the itch, especially since we were robbed of CFB/NCAA [College Football 25, which isn't available on PC]. Going from [Madden NFL] '23 to '25 myself I don't have many complaints, the new features are pretty cool and all.»

Another described it as «the best iteration in recent memory,» but compared it to ordering a pizza from Little Caesars. «You eat it because it's familiar, close to your house, and it's just something you do. Once in a while you get a pie from there and you think to yourself, 'Wow, this is still crap but it's definitely better than it normally is'.»

Concurrent player numbers on Steam aren't great either: According to SteamDB, the concurrent player count peaked at 4,380, which seems awfully small for a series of Madden's popularity. That's not the entirety of the Madden population on PC—it's also available on the Epic Games Store and the EA App—but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Steam very likely makes up the bulk of it.

That's especially interesting because of EA's long history of not releasing some of its biggest sports games on PC. Former EA Sports chief Peter Moore said in 2008 (via the Wayback Machine) that the demand for sports games on PC had «declined rapidly» in the face of growing console popularity, while the PC market as a whole was rife with piracy. For the Madden NFL series, that spelled the end of the games on PC for more than a decade: Madden NFL 19 was