‘FIFA 23’ swamped with negative reviews over PC anti-cheat error

The PC version of FIFA 23 has received hundreds of negative reviews, with players reporting performance issues and a game-breaking anti-cheat error.

Since launching yesterday (September 29), over 700 negative reviews have been left on FIFA 23‘s Steam page.

FIFA 23 currently has a ‘Mostly Negative’ review tag on the storefront and at time of writing, just 27 per cent of its player reviews on Steam are positive. However, looking at FIFA 23‘s Steam page shows that even many of the “recommended” reviews are critical of the game.

Many of the game’s negative reviews relate to an anti-cheat error that stops FIFA 23 from launching, an issue that’s affecting both Origin and Steam users.

When trying to boot up the game, players are being met with a message that says “EA AntiCheat Service encountered an error. Please restart the game.” This error prevents the game from being opened, meaning buyers are unable to play the game.

The issue has been plaguing fans since FIFA 23 launched early for Ultimate Edition and EA Play owners earlier in the week, and EA has confirmed that the issue is “under investigation at this time.”

In the meantime, the developer has provided the following fix to try until it’s addressed properly.

“Please attempt to launch FIFA 23 and get the ‘EA AntiCheat error’ then fully exit the Origin/EA Apps on your PC,” says EA. “Then relaunch with administrator privileges and try launching FIFA 23.”

However, in the same support thread players have reported the solution not working for them.

Besides FIFA 23‘s anti-cheat error, players are also reporting that the game has been poorly optimised for PC. One Steam review claims to be suffering from “the worst possible optimisation” despite owning a 3080 Ti graphics card, while another claimed to suffer FPS drops with a 3070 card.

Due to the amount of issues being reported for PC versions, FIFA 23‘s community subreddit has created a specific thread to discuss the platform’s problems, which includes nearly 1000 comments that include reports of crashing, poor performance, and issues with the anti-cheat.

Earlier in the week, FIFA 23 suffered server issues that prevented players from getting into the game during its early access launch.