FIFA 23

» see ea.com/games/ea-sports-fc/fifa-23 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

fifa was on every pc in every internet cafe in ankara for a solid stretch of the early '00s. before pes was king of the split-screen tourney, before eFootball, before ea sports fc, the disc that came home from the shop had a fifa year on it. i played fifa 98 and fifa 99 at home on our tower, and then fifa 2001 at the cafe on saturdays. the annual buy loop was the whole business model of the franchise.

fifa 23 shipped on 30 september 2022, the last one to carry the fifa mark. ea vancouver and ea romania built it, mbappé and sam kerr on the ultimate edition cover. still. cross-play was the headline feature, hypermotion2 was the animation-tech buzzword. the world cup update rolled in for qatar '22 as a free content drop later that year. the year after, ea renamed the whole thing ea sports fc and the fifa brand went to konami and 2k as a licensable mark instead of a game.

i was thirty eight when fifa 23 came out. i had been out of the annual buy loop for maybe a decade at that point, my last full run was around fifa 09 on a friend's ps3, but yeah. the game i knew was the game turkish teenagers played after school and streamed on twitch for the ultimate team pack openings. i knew the rhythm from the outside.

this happened more in the streaming world than where i sort of was. ea announced the online shutdown in september 2025. servers dark on 30 october. career mode still boots and kick-off still boots. the modes people spent real money on are gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the money worked ~

fifa ultimate team was the reason ea ran the servers at all. really though, the mode wrapped card packs around real players and let you build a squad out of loot pulls. you paid real money for fifa points, you spent fifa points on packs, you traded on a live auction house. the ftue was designed to funnel you toward the pack menu inside the first hour. by 2022 fut was generating the majority of the fifa franchise's revenue, close enough. career mode and the world cup update were basically the loss leader that shipped the disc into the household.

this part i saw from the pack-opening streams on youtube and twitch, mostly. the top turkish fifa streamers were doing hundreds of thousands of views on their ronaldo pulls and their weekend league runs. the loop worked in ankara the same way it worked in london or são paulo, the fifa brand pulled the identity, the fut mode pulled the wallet.

~ how it ended ~

this part you had to be paying attention to ea's rolling online-services shutdown schedule for. ea has been quietly cutting the online layer on sports titles roughly three years after release, matching the console generation. fifa 23 hit that window in october 2025. announcement came in september of that year. the shutdown swept four ea titles at once. need for speed rivals, madden nfl 22, nhl 21, fifa 23. still. fifa 23 was the biggest brand in the batch by an order of magnitude.

the offline modes are technically still there but the fifa people played was ultimate team and division rivals (or whatever it was called). that whole layer is gone. players who had spent hundreds of dollars on fut packs were left with a squad that could still take the pitch against the ai and nothing else. this is what "always-online sports title" ends up meaning at end of life.

~ what got buried with it ~

still. fifa 23 was not just another annual disc. it was the last one the fifa people knew by that name, ea sports fc 24 shipped in september 2023 and the fifa mark went to konami's efootball and 2k's licensed titles as a plain label rather than the actual gameplay franchise. for what its worth. the ea studios that had shipped fifa every year since 1993 kept shipping the same game with a new logo on the box.

the shutdown wrote a hard end date on the last game the franchise called fifa. for a series that had shipped an annual disc for thirty straight years, the online services closing on the final one felt like the second death of the brand. the first was the corporate rename in 2023. the second was the servers going dark in october '25.

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