Don't pay full price for NHL 23 (or most video games, honestly)
This is an every year thing
With each year, EA’s NHL video games seem to release with less and less fanfare. If you’re like me, the release of “NHL 23” really snuck up on you. (Or maybe you’ve been eagerly awaiting every release of polarizing player ratings?)
Perhaps “NHL 23” caught you off guard, and with that, your eyes are darting back and forth from the game and your wallet.
Allow me simple advice: don’t pay full price for it. And, really, there aren’t a ton of video games you should be paying full price for.
(Or at least … you don’t really have to pay full price for them, if you’re wealthy go for it. Also, donate to the Cold Gives Foundation II while you’re at it.)
Chances are, “NHL 23” will go on sale pretty quickly
Generally, there’s one type of video game that almost never goes on sale, and when it does, the savings are almost-insulting (considering how long said titles have been out). Those games, of course, were made by Nintendo.
(While the good news is that just about every Nintendo game is good-to-downright-classic, it does limit the odds of impulse-buying their latest zany take on golf.)
Sports video games might not plummet as far as titles that “bomb” would, but they still generally get discounted fairly quickly. A cursory “NHL 22” search on go-to video game discount Twitter feeds showed that it went on a fairly significant sale in mere months.
Anecdotally, it feels like this happens every year, and you should get multiple chances to pay far less than the first sticker price ($70 USD, more if you get tricked into buying some CRASS CAPITALISM EDITION).
So, if you just want to own “NHL 23,” you probably wouldn’t need to wait long to do it at a steep discount.
If you’re clever like a fox, it could end up costing you even less.
EA Play trial buying you time until it’s essentially “free?”
Right now, people who have EA Play can use a 10-hour “trial” of “NHL 23.” If you have Xbox’s GamePass, you also have EA Play. As far as I can tell, Sony’s ramped-up Playstation Plus does not yet include it. But even if you have a PS4/PS5 instead, EA Play tends to be cheap, and that 10-hour trial might fit your needs better than splurging on the full $70 right off the bat.
Really, if “NHL 23” is something you play every now and then — rather than an obsession — you could probably use that 10-hour trial to either sate your appetite until a sale hits, or even wait until “NHL 23” becomes fully available on EA Play/GamePass.
That’s one of the nice things about EA Play: if you wait long enough (in my experience, sometime around when the playoffs begin), the full game is included.
For those who complain that sports video games are just year-to-year “roster updates,” well … you could just play “NHL 22” when your trial runs out, then either jump on a sale or wait until it’s fully available.
Personally, the only pitch for buying “NHL 23” at full price is a rather simple one: if you know you’ll be playing it so much, and so soon, that it’s worth it. I imagine if you’re in that category, you’ve probably already bought the game, though.
A quick, tepid defense of sports video games
Before we go, I thought I’d very softly defend annualized sports video games for a moment.
On one hand, it’s true that year-to-year updates really do sometimes feel like glorified roster refreshes. Those hoping for huge changes are likely to be disappointed. And, in my experience, big changes usually means something that feels really forced. There’s a real “be careful what you wish for” element to a lot of this stuff.
Yet, when you think about each sports video game from a “value proposition” standpoint, the price tag becomes more reasonable.
With some video games, you’d likely be able to see the credits roll within a 10-hour window. In the case of “NHL 23,” you’re either not going to like the game at all, or possibly spend hundreds of hours with it if you’re hooked.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that different from getting a sequel to a Far Cry game or something.
To an extent, I feel bad for the Vancouver-based developers of the NHL series. Just like other sports titles, the expectation is for annual releases. Yet, NHL doesn’t sell anywhere near as much as FIFA or Madden, and thus they don’t exactly have a world-beating budget to make drastic changes to the hockey. (Just look at how pissed people get about Madden.)
Naturally, this sympathy only goes so far. After all, EA Sports is (at least ostensibly) asking people to pay the same significant fee to play “NHL 23” that they will from FIFA or Madden titles. Knowing how much tougher it can be to make that sausage doesn’t make it any easier to chew down a possibly inferior product that costs the same meaty price.
But, of course … you’re not paying that beefiest price, because you read Cold Gives.
NHL 23 image via EA Sports.