Tony Wang12 min readFIFA 22 Is Delisted, Its Servers Are Dead — and Its Steam Score Never Moved
We mined FIFA 22's Steam reviews around EA's server shutdown. The Very Positive score never moved — reviews naming the dead servers are twice as negative.
FIFA 22 no longer sells on Steam. "FIFA 22 is no longer available on the Steam store," its own listing reads — while still disclosing, in the same breath, that it "incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line activation and Origin client software installation and background use required." EA retired the game's online services for all platforms on 2024-11-04, per EA's own record, with a further disconnection dated 2025-10-30 on a community tracker. Almost two years on, we pulled FIFA 22's entire Steam review history — 130,062 votes across every language it supports, an exhaustive lifetime count, not a sample — plus a 217-review pull of current English reviews via Crawlora's Steam Reviews API, to see what actually happened to the score, and where the anger about a dead-but-undead game went.
The score never moved
Roll the lifetime histogram up by year and the line is almost suspiciously flat. FIFA 22 launched in October 2021 at 79.6–83.1% positive in its first three months, and five years later — after two documented server shutdowns and an actual delisting — it's still 79.1% to 81.6% positive, every single year:
| Year | Positive | Negative | Total | % positive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 24,358 | 5,983 | 30,341 | 80.3% |
| 2022 | 65,799 | 17,361 | 83,160 | 79.1% |
| 2023 | 9,734 | 2,207 | 11,941 | 81.5% |
| 2024 | 2,427 | 569 | 2,996 | 81.0% |
| 2025 | 924 | 239 | 1,163 | 79.4% |
| 2026* | 376 | 85 | 461 | 81.6% |
Zoom into the three months on either side of each shutdown date and the picture holds. The November 2024 cutoff shows the only real dip — positive share slid from 80.8% to 77.9% — but it didn't compound, and the October 2025 cutoff shows no dip at all:
510 reviews
453 reviews
255 reviews
221 reviews
No review-bombing, at either date. Review volume keeps declining — that's the ordinary decay curve every aging Steam game follows — but the rate of people clicking thumbs-up among whoever still bothers to review barely moves. That stability is the whole reason the aggregate badge on the store page still reads Very Positive: 80% of 39,232 English-language reviews, as of this writing, with the most recent 30-day window (83% of 77) reading even higher.
What actually happened to the servers
The timeline, on the public record:
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-06-30 | FIFA 22 online services disconnected for EA Play members | Community FUT tracker |
| 2024-11-04 | FIFA 22 online services and features retired for all platforms | EA's own service-updates page |
| 2025-10-30 | FIFA 22 disconnected for all platforms (further/fuller cutoff) | Community FUT tracker |
Only the November 2024 date is confirmed on an EA-published source; the October 2025 entry comes from a community-maintained tracker, and we could not find an EA primary source for it — flagged in the open dataset as unofficial. Either way, the practical effect for a Steam owner today is on the store listing itself, which we read live on 2026-07-21:
A paid, single-purchase game that still requires online activation through a company account, sold by a publisher that has since disconnected its servers twice and pulled the listing entirely — that's not a hypothetical edge case anymore. It's the exact practice a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Killing Games" collected over 1.4 million signatures against by mid-2025 (about 1.29 million validated), aimed at publishers who cut the server connection a game needs to keep running rather than publishing an end-of-life plan. FIFA 22 isn't cited as a flagship example in that campaign, but its Steam listing today reads like a textbook illustration of the pattern the petition targets.
The 5% that says otherwise
Against a stable 80%-positive aggregate, we pulled 217 of the most-helpful and most-recent English-language reviews — all of them dated after both shutdown milestones — and keyword-matched them for shutdown language (server, offline, won't/can't launch, delisted) and nostalgia language ("last good FIFA," "RIP," GOAT). The overall sample tracks the badge closely (80.6% thumbs-up, versus the live 80%), which is itself a useful check: a small, recent, most-helpful-weighted sample still lands on almost exactly the same number as Steam's full aggregate.
Inside that sample, the shutdown-themed reviews are a small slice — but a sharply negative one:
What they actually say, verbatim (star direction and playtime shown, not usernames):
"They have shut down the servers so good luck on trying anything on this game. Greedy EA rats. Do not buy any EA FC titles." — 👎, 53 hrs played
"Wild how EA shuts down servers and thus breaks access to portions of their game that THEY CHOSE to put behind mandatory online requirements. Baffling choices. More corpo garbage taking away access to games that people have PAID FOR." — 👎, 8 hrs played
"offline should stay offline..." — 👎, 537 hrs played
"Had a lot of fun in offline gamemodes for 400 hours, but then the game decided to just not launch anymore. No fix available. THANKS EA!" — 👎, 401 hrs played
That last pair is the sharpest version of the complaint: not that online multiplayer went away (expected, and arguably fine), but that people who say they were playing offline modes — Career Mode, Kick-Off — describe the game failing to launch at all after the cutoff. We can't independently verify EA's online-activation check is the specific cause in every case; we can verify that the store listing itself discloses the mandatory online DRM, and that this is the exact complaint shape the reviews converge on.
Nostalgia is doing more work than anger
Scale the two themes against each other and nostalgia wins by a wide margin — 31 of 217 reviews (14.3%) volunteer some version of "this was the last good one," almost three times the 5.1% that mention the shutdown directly:
"the last good football game made by EA. RIP" — 👍, 379 hrs played
"last good fifa" — 👍, 147 hrs played
"In my opinion, this is the last good FIFA game. Don't bother buying anything released after this title." — 👍, 132 hrs played
"Thank god I bought FIFA 22 before EA removed the game from Steam, because this was the very last FIFA game that works on Linux [via Proton]! Now I am sad to see that FIFA 23... don't work at all on Linux." — 👍, 3 hrs played
FIFA 22 was never Linux-native — its own store platform flags read Windows-only — but Proton compatibility made it playable on Linux and the Steam Deck, and reviewers are explicitly framing that as something the series lost. That tracks with a pattern we found across the whole catalog in our State of Steam 2026 study: native Linux support among top games fell from 44% of 2013 releases to about 11% by 2024, even as Deck adoption grew, because studios increasingly skip native builds and rely on Proton instead — and here, the newer titles in the same franchise apparently don't even clear that bar via Proton.
The reviews also carry real weight behind them: median playtime across the sample is 197 hours, the mean is 375 hours, and the single most-invested reviewer logged 4,597 hours — 191 days of in-game time on a $60 sports title. These aren't drive-by reviews. They're written by people who played FIFA 22 as their primary football game for years, and who are now watching it get walled off from new purchases while the newer, purchasable EA Sports FC entries are the ones drawing the "last good one" comparison.
What holds up, and what doesn't
What holds up: the aggregate score is genuinely stable across both shutdown dates — that's population-level data, not a sample, so it's the most solid claim in this piece. The shutdown-mentioning slice of current reviews is small but reliably more negative than the rest of the same sample. The delisting and DRM-requirement facts come straight from the live store listing.
What limits it:
- The 217-review sample is a snapshot, not a before/after. Because it was pulled on a single date and weighted toward "most helpful," it entirely postdates both shutdowns — we can describe what people say now, not how the same population's tone shifted at the moment of each cutoff.
- Keyword matching counts a mention, not a verified cause. A review saying the game "won't launch" is counted as shutdown-themed whether or not the online-activation requirement is provably the trigger in that specific case.
- The October 2025 shutdown date is unofficial — sourced to a community tracker, not an EA-published notice like the November 2024 date.
- Steam's review-histogram endpoint doesn't actually filter by language despite accepting a
languageparameter —l=englishandl=allreturn identical totals — so the 130,062-review lifetime figure is every supported language combined, a superset of the 39,232 English-only badge Steam shows an English-locale visitor. Both are real, exhaustive counts; they're just different scopes, and we've been explicit above about which is which.
Sources
Methodology
Every number here was pulled through Crawlora's own Steam reviews and reviews histogram endpoints on 2026-07-21. The lifetime histogram is Steam's full public up/down vote record for FIFA 22 since its review window opened — exhaustive, not a sample. The 217-review qualitative sample combines the filter=all and filter=recent review feeds (English language, deduplicated by recommendation ID), keyword-matched against a shutdown-theme list (server, shut down, offline, won't/can't/doesn't launch, no longer available, delisted) and a nostalgia-theme list (last good fifa, last fifa, rip, goat). Store-listing facts — the delisting notice, DRM disclosure, and live review badges — were read directly from the storefront the same day. We publish aggregates only in the open dataset — no raw review text tied to individual reviewers; the quotes above are sourced from public Steam reviews and attributed only by vote direction and playtime.
The full aggregate — monthly and yearly histogram, shutdown timeline, sample theme counts — is open on GitHub under CC BY 4.0. For the mechanics of pulling this yourself, see how to scrape Steam (store details, reviews, and the histogram endpoint in one API); for the catalog-wide picture FIFA 22's Linux/Proton comments plug into, see State of Steam 2026. For the same review-mining method applied elsewhere, see what 1,610 reviews of the Claude app reveal and X's App Store rating vs. its written reviews.
Pull a game's full review history yourself
Every number in this study came from Crawlora's Steam endpoints — store details, reviews, and the full review histogram as normalized JSON, with proxies and anti-bot handled, billed pay-on-success. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
Is FIFA 22 still available on Steam?
No. FIFA 22's own Steam listing reads "FIFA 22 is no longer available on the Steam store" as of our 2026-07-21 check — it can no longer be purchased, though owners can still install and (where the DRM allows) play it. The listing also discloses mandatory 3rd-party DRM: EA online activation and Origin client installation and background use.
When did EA shut down FIFA 22's servers?
EA's own service-updates page states FIFA 22's online services and features were "retired... for all platforms" on 2024-11-04. A community-maintained FIFA Ultimate Team tracker lists a further disconnection on 2025-10-30, though we could not find an EA primary source confirming that second date specifically.
Did FIFA 22's Steam rating drop after the server shutdown?
No — not in any lasting way. Rolled up by year, FIFA 22's lifetime Steam review histogram (130,062 votes across all languages, an exhaustive count) stayed within a 79.1%–81.6% positive band every year from its 2021 launch through 2026, spanning both the November 2024 and October 2025 shutdown dates. A 3-month window around the first cutoff shows a small dip (80.8% to 77.9%) that didn't compound; the second cutoff shows no dip at all.
What do FIFA 22's negative reviews actually complain about?
In a 217-review sample of current English-language reviews, only 5.1% explicitly mention the dead servers, a launch failure, or the delisting — but that slice is only 36.4% thumbs-up, versus 83.0% for the rest of the sample. Common complaints: EA's mandatory online-activation DRM breaking access to modes players describe as offline (Career Mode, Kick-Off), not just online multiplayer going away.
What is the 'Stop Killing Games' movement?
A European Citizens' Initiative, formally 'Stop Destroying Videogames,' that gathered over 1.4 million signatures (about 1.29 million validated) by its July 2025 close, pushing the EU to require publishers to publish an end-of-life plan before cutting the server connection a purchased game needs to run, rather than leaving it non-functional. FIFA 22's current Steam listing — delisted, mandatory online DRM, servers off — is a real-world example of the exact pattern the initiative targets.