fifa 23

If you're anything like us, you've probably been limbering up for a brand new season - the very last season, in fact - of EA's FIFA footballing franchise in the form of the upcoming FIFA 23 and, if you've got Game Pass Ultimate, you'll likely also have been looking to dive into the game's free ten hour EA Play trial which has now gone live.

However, as we've personally experienced, and as Xbox Support has now officially recognised, things are not working as they should be with the free trial right now. In fact, it seems it's completely broken! As posted on the official Xbox Support Twitter account, the EA Trial is currently refusing to let many - if not all - players access the game due to a validation error.

There are currently a lot of rather angry players hitting up social media to complain about the issue and, amidst all the shouting, there's even a few workarounds being shared, one of which has worked for us a handful of times.

The first workaround we've found is to go into your manage game settings for FIFA 23 and delete all save game data, something we haven't yet tried as we don't really want to lose our progress. It's also been suggested that signing in as a guest user fixes the issue, something we've yet to try.

The other suggestion is to boot up the trial, choose to "play trial" then immediately press the Xbox button and head back out to the console's homescreen. Give it twenty or thirty seconds, head back into the game and it will once again make you choose "play trial", except this time it should skip the validation error and let you in.

All of these workarounds aren't ideal though, of course, the second one has worked for us a few times but it's been flaky, so hopefully there's gonna be an official explanation and/or fix in the very near future.

Have you been having issues accessing the FIFA 23 trial? Found a reliable workaround for the issue? Let us know in the comments.