Madden NFL 20’s Online Franchise, down for some since Halloween, now down for all

Those who argue that the shift in priorities from legacy modes to revenue-generating modes in sports games has been harmful to consumers have another piece of evidence of just that. Online Franchise in Madden NFL 20 has been experiencing issues since the end of October for some and now, due to problems encountered upon attempts to fix that, EA Sports has taken Online Franchise down completely for everyone.

Yesterday, our teams attempted to roll out a server side fix to address the issue where some Online Franchise Leagues were unable to login. After the fix was rolled out, we noticed that the Franchise servers started to lock up. Late last night, a decision was made that we had to gate all of the Franchise Online modes to prevent all the Madden servers from locking up, which would have impacted all game modes.

Beginning on Halloween some players found themselves unable to access their server-based cloud franchise saves. It turned out that it was happening to franchise files that were created early on in July and August. That explained why not everyone in ongoing franchises was having the issue and newly created franchises were operating just fine.

Currently there is no in-game message regarding the servers for Franchise having been taken down. Unfortunately only a “connection error” message is displayed. Offline Franchise and Face of the Franchise are not affected.

It took way too long for EA Sports to make a real comment on the situation and now things have only gotten worse. The next update is supposedly going to be given a full three days from now. Needless to say if the problems were related to Ultimate Team, and not Franchise, the scrambling on the company’s side as well as their communication would have been starkly different.