EA Officially Announces FIFA 21 Play Live Event Delay
EA has announced that their Play Live event has been officially postponed, which means players will have to wait even longer for the release of FIFA 21.
FIFA fans have been looking forward to any news on the series' next title for months, and now it looks like they'll have to wait even longer after EA's news on June 5th.
The digital event was originally supposed to start at 16pm on June 00th, but has now been pushed back a week to June 11th at the same time, according to EA.
- Electronic Arts (@EA) June 5, 2020
"With important conversations going on right now and important voices being heard around the world, we are moving towards coming together," EA said on Twitter. "We'll see you at EA PLAY Live 2020 on June 18 at 16:00 PM PT / 19:00 PM ET."
While this doesn't mean the actual FIFA 21 release date will be delayed at all, it will take an extra week until we get our first look at the next chapter.
While the 2021 game has yet to be officially announced, we can draw comparisons from recent years to come up with a reasonably accurate estimate. FIFA 20 came out on September 27th and FIFA 19 came out on September 28th, so we expect the next date to fall in the last week of the month.
FIFA 21 beta
EA Sports usually invites some players to join online betas before their games are released. Invitations are sent out via email, granting select accounts early access to certain game modes - including Career, Pro Clubs, and more - and usually happens in August.
In last year's game, beta testing took place from August 9 to August 22, which gave community members the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the changes, and the developers to make adjustments accordingly. This time, we expect similar deadlines to be met.
The demos that come out after the beta will never be too similar to the games that will eventually be released - although fans still love to download them and try them at the end of every game. Sometimes, though, a demo can give us a good idea of what EA is working on. We expect the demo to go live in the first week of September or later.
While we'll have to wait another week for our first look at FIFA 21, the good news is that this delay shouldn't affect the game's overall release schedule, which, as we mentioned, we'll most likely see at the end of September.