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EA Sports announced Friday that its college football video game, CFB 27, will no longer include microtransactions in single-player modes.
The pivot comes after widespread fan backlash and campaigns to boycott the game, largely driven by popular online personalities whose content serves as crucial promotional vehicles for modern games.
Advertisement Microtransactions, which require players to pay for access to certain in-game features, are commonplace in many games that feature online multiplayer modes.
They often involve character skins or power-ups that give paying players exclusive content.
Those transactions, however, are typically limited to online play, whereas most single-player games allow players to access their core content once they purchase the game.
In the case of CFB 27, released on July 2 for deluxe-version buyers and on Thursday for the general public, EA required players to pay for XP slider progression within the games Dynasty and Road To Glory Modes.
The modes are two of the franchises most popular, and are both single-player in nature.
The base games $69.99 price further made the inclusion of microtransactions a point of criticism.
By requiring additional payments to progress in those single-player modes, EA broke with a model it had established across its sports games over the last 30 years, and online backlash was swift.
Average players and prominent sports game influencers called the tactic a money grab and expressed outrage that EA hadnt announced their inclusion before the game launched.
Sneaking micro transactions into single player modes lets me know everything i need to about where EA wants to take both football titles in the future Thats why its now or never to make a change.
Taking the game in that direction is going to ruin all of the support and love..
Bordeaux (@bordeauxyoutube) July 7, 2026 Recognizing the response, EA has now decided to eliminate the paid progression systems at the center of the controversy.
It said the changes will take effect Saturday morning.
In College Football 27, we aspired to deliver the deepest experience to date with all-new Dynasty Blueprint, new positions in Road to Glory, and the best College Football gameplay yet, the game publisher said in a statement on X.
Advertisement However, your feedback on Road To Glory and Dynasty is that weve missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options.
This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more choice, but what youve said is that theyre not adding the value we intended.
An update from the College Football 27 Team.
#CFBGoPlay pic.twitter.com/00b4TZrlPR College Football 27 (@EASPORTSCollege) July 11, 2026 Prominent figures such as sports gamer Bordeaux, who stood at the center of the online outcry, celebrated the move as a victory Friday night.
Bordeauxs initial YouTube video criticizing the new microtransactions garnered more than 530,000 views over three days.
Shortly after EAs announcement, the streamer posted a new video titled We Won on YouTube and pulled in 69,000 views in less than three hours.
His X post thanking the company for listening to the community accumulated 286,000 views and 26,000 likes in three hours.
CFB 27 is the third game in EAs revival of its college football series, which began releasing annually in 1993 but went dormant after the 2014 installment.
The 2024 return with CFB 25 became the all-time best-selling American sports game in U.S.
dollar sales, according to retail analysis firm Circana.
While EA Sports does not make its full sales numbers public, senior vice president Daryl Holt told The Athletic last year that the game outperformed all our expectations.
Now, EAs reversal of the microtransaction system is among the biggest fan-driven video game reworks in the industrys history by one of its largest corporations.