For the last few installments of NHL, there have been four major game modes that fans play. Hockey Ultimate Team (HUT) where you open packs and build your own team. Franchise Mode, where you can be the general manager of a NHL club. Be A Pro lets players life the NHL experience from getting drafted to winning the Stanley Cup. Lastly, World of Chel (or EASHL) lets you play as your own customizable character with up to 11 other players. Many players have played most of if not all of these game modes at least once, but which one do fans enjoy watching the most?
While not the most popular game to stream, NHL is watched by hundreds of thousands of fans on platforms including Twitch, Kick, Youtube, TikTok, and more. The game often sees it's largest spikes in viewership around the launch of the newest NHL game, around the holidays, and during the Team Of The Year promo event in HUT. These streams are mostly dominated by the Hockey Ultimate Team game mode, with content creators in that specific game mode seeing well over 1,000 concurrent live viewers at launch. It's been a common conception that HUT was the dominant game mode, so myself and The Hockey News reached out to fans via a twitter poll to see if this was the case.
The results? Pretty shocking to say the least. Out of our 256 responses, over 40% said they enjoyed watching Franchise Mode over any other mode in NHL. As well, 78.5% of responses preferred other game modes besides HUT. It's common knowledge that World of Chel is the most played game mode by players, but to see such a large percentage of people preferring other game modes over HUT is shocking when so many live streams are dedicated to HUT.
What does this mean for Hockey Ultimate Team though? One belief is that it's possible that the "cycle" has become stale, and has deterred fans from playing the game mode. HUT players have the same cycle of game modes within HUT to play for the last few years, and many players have complained that the game mode has become stale. Even though the game mode is the main component of the yearly NHL World Championship, it's not far fetched to assume this stale cycle has lead to the decline in HUT players.
Another theory is that while HUT is the only game mode where Electronic Arts directly makes revenue, a large percentage of NHL gamers just prefer playing other modes that aren't related to building their own team with virtual cards. While card collecting is a major aspect of the sport of hockey, one could argue that managing your own virtual NHL team, or creating a character to get drafted into the NHL, or even playing with multiple friends at a time is a more important aspect of hockey.
Regardless of the reasons, many people were surprised at the results of the poll. It was a pleasant surprise to see other game modes of NHL outperform the one game mode many think is EA's biggest focus. The poll also gives some insight into why games like NHL 14 were so well received. Every game mode was good, not great but good. As a result, they were able to make more fans happy by doing many things good rather than one thing great.