How does EA Social work? Here’s how to play FIFA 23 with your friends

EA gave cross-play a major overhaul for the release of FIFA 23 in an attempt to make it more accessible. Part of that overhaul is the implementation of EA Social, the new way to find friends and enter matchmaking across different platforms.

EA is giving the process of finding and playing FIFA 23 with your friends a whole new look. The new EA Social widget includes much more information on your friends, the platform they’re playing on, and their availability for crossplay.

Those simply looking to find a friend and jump straight into the game without bothering with any side content have nothing to worry about. Using EA Social is not in any way more complicated than the standard friend searches of previous installments.

How does EA Social work in FIFA 23?

EA Social is the unification of all friend lists, invites, and game invites in FIFA 23 into one hub. Friends added through your local platform and friends added through EA Network will all appear in the unified EA Social friends list.

You will be able to see some status info such as your friends being online, their gaming platform, and any potential incompatibility for online play. There are also options to mute, remove, block, or report your friends if it all comes down to it.

Just like friends, all game invites are also funneled through EA Social this year, so you don’t have to navigate to a different place each time you want to play a different game mode.

How to add friends in FIFA 23 with EA Social

EA Social friend invites work no differently than regular local invites that we’re used to. Open the EA Social main menu, toggle over to player search, type in your friend’s EA account username, and send a friend request.

Once they accept, you will be added to each other’s EA Social friend lists and could then invite one another to play the available FIFA 23 game modes. The one thing to keep attention to is that while the player search is not sensitive to caps, you need to type in the full correct user name of your friend for it to register.

EA Social is mandatory for FIFA 23 cross-platform play, so if you have friends on other platforms that you wish to connect with, just follow the outlined steps above and you should be fine.