The EA FC community is always a fan of some good drama. For many people, FC 26 has been a bit of a mixed bag, especially for the PC crowd. Of course, if you’re a dedicated FC player, you know that this is nothing new. Just a couple of months after the latest game’s release, posts on Reddit and X light up with claims of the game “dying.”
It’s happening to FC 26 again, but is there actually any truth to the matter this time? The game has been around for quite a while now, and like most annual sports releases, it still has its issues. With player numbers dropping on Steam and Twitch viewership declining, there are questions around whether FC 26 is losing a significant amount of players.
But is the sky actually falling, or are we just zooming in on one corner of a much bigger pitch? Let’s take a quick look at how the game currently stands.
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PC Engagement And Twitch Viewership
One post on the r/EASportsFC subreddit highlighted significant drops in the quantity of players on PC. Some data from SteamDB also backs up this claim. At the time of writing (late March 2026), FC 26 sits at nearly 57,000 concurrent players. The game hit an all-time peak of 100,753 players right around the TOTY event and major update.
These numbers certainly aren’t bad by any means, but they are lower when compared to FIFA 23. Notably, during the TOTY event, FIFA 23 had an average of around 59,600 daily players. FC 26 had an average of 49,600 players. Note that the average daily players is different from the peak player count. The former measures the number of active users over 24 hours, while peak player count refers to the maximum concurrent players at a single moment.
Here are the monthly averages of FC 26 from SteamDB, which tell a different tale:
- Last 30 days: 40,292 daily average (up 5.59% recently)
- March 2026: 38,160 (down 12.43% from February)
February 2026: 43,576 (down 12.09% from January)
- January 2026: 49,570 (a strong +15.10% month)
The peaks in December and January represent holiday gifting and early Ultimate Team excitement. These are followed by the post-New Year fall as casuals stop playing and the grinders remain. Twitch numbers show the same, with FC 26 ranked around #15 in December, averaging 21,628 viewers, peaking at 183,800 all-time. However, Twitch Viewership for Ultimate Team dropped by 50% compared to FIFA 23. But does that actually matter in the grand scheme of things?
The Claims Are Exaggerated
Here’s the catch: PC figures only represent a slice of the pie. The majority of EA FC players play on console, with PS5 and PS4 dominating the market. Sales data and platform analytics show PlayStation covers over 60% of total FC 26 sales in the critical launch window. This means Steam numbers, while useful, significantly underrepresent the full picture.
Retail and digital sales charts back the fact that this game is clearly not in trouble. In the Circana data for U.S sales of February 2026, EA FC 26 was ranked as the 6th best-selling game, ranking even above EA’s own Battlefield 6 in various monthly breakdowns.
These declines on PC and Twitch are 100% real, but they’re certainly nothing unusual for EA FC. This is a common pattern seen in every yearly release: massive launch spikes, holiday boosts, then a casual decline till the end of the game. So, as usual, take the claims of “X Game is dead” with a grain of salt unless you see the actual data to back them up.
Published: Mar 25, 2026 05:15 pm