If the Detroit Red Wings (my team) lose tonight, they could miss the playoffs for the first time in a quarter of a century. But Electronic Arts may give me the chance to ignore reality by adding its NHL 17 game to the vault of games in its EA Access subscription service.
Xbox One owners who pay the $5 per month or $30 per year for an EA Access membership can download NHL 17 today. This is the third year in a row that EA has added its hockey game to its vault just before the start of the National Hockey League’s playoffs, which gets underway in April. While it’s likely that the bulk of the audience that would go out and buy it already has already done so, it’s just as likely that EA will get more value from ongoing Access subscribers than people purchasing NHL 17 this late in its life.
NHL 17 is the latest game to join the EA Access vault. By subscribing to the service, you will have an instant library of games. While that list includes some older sports titles, you can also download Madden NFL 17, UFC 2, Titanfall, Star Wars: Battlefront, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and more. And unlike PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Games with Gold, EA’s games don’t ever fall off of this list. While you have only a month to get the latest PS Plus games, you can’t go back and download the offerings from previous months. This makes EA Access one of the better deals in gaming — especially for people who are only now jumping onto an Xbox One and want a ton of good games at a relatively low price.
