EA Play is a service-within-a-service perk for Xbox Game Pass subs on consoles and, starting tomorrow, PC too
After a longer-than-expected rollout, Xbox Game Pass subscribers on PC will soon be able to play a bunch of EA-published games at no extra cost – including Star Wars: Squadrons. Game Pass and EA Play are bundling up. While that already happened on Xbox consoles, the PC side of things has been weirdly slow-going. The official start date? March 18 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. Hey, that’s tomorrow!
If you aren’t sure where to start with this stuff, there’s a minor hassle involved before you can access your free-with-a-membership games. You’ll have to download the EA Desktop app, log in with a current or newly-created EA Account, and link it with your Xbox account. I know, I know. Too many steps.
That said, the actual process is pretty straightforward: just try to install an EA Play game through the Xbox app on PC and the system will point you in the right direction as far as the EA app is concerned.
It’s also worth mentioning that you don’t need to “sign up” for EA Play. It’s an automatic perk.
You can find an up-to-date list of included EA Play games over here; highlights include Jedi: Fallen Order, Titanfall 2, A Way Out, Unravel Two, Spore, and 10-hour new game trials (click “See Games” in the Xbox app). All told, there’s 60-plus PC games. Many aren’t what you’d consider “recent,” but they hold up fine.
If you have Xbox Game Pass for PC or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, knock yourself out. I’ve said it before, but more often than not, “renting” EA games is my preferred method. Game Pass makes it easy.
