EA Play on Xbox Game Pass for PC is delayed to 2021

Xbox Game Pass for PC
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s plan was to bring the EA Play games library into the Xbox Game Pass for PC fold today, but now that’s not going to happen – with the move being delayed to next year.

The Xbox Game Pass team announced this in a blog post which called for keen gamers to have a little more patience: “We made the decision to delay until 2021 the release of EA Play on PC as part of the Xbox Game Pass for PC and Ultimate memberships.”

No specific reason is given save for a rather generic paragraph essentially saying that more time is needed to ensure a ‘great experience’ when it comes to accessing EA Play titles via the Game Pass.

No estimated arrival date has been provided beyond the fact that it’ll be next year.

No notice

There are certainly some unhappy gamers out there online, mainly because December 15 was promised as the firm launch date, so the move is very last-minute – with the release blog post suddenly being swapped out for the delay announcement.

The chatter from the disgruntled folks out there speculating about why this has happened ranges from theories about some huge bug being stumbled on, to potential issues caused by EA’s acquisition of Codemasters which just happened. It’s certainly very odd to see a launch scrapped on the actual day like this.

Hopefully we will hear soon enough when the new launch date will be, and equally we can keep our fingers crossed that it will be pretty early on in 2021.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).