Madden NFL 21 is currently sitting at a 65 on Metacritic, the lowest reviewed Madden since Metacritic began tracking the series 20 years ago, lowest by 9 points:

The game is also getting terrible user reviews, currently sitting at 0.4/10 on PS4. And "NFL drop EA" is trending on Twitter, with people asking NFL to take the license away from EA and give it to another publisher, posting clips of horrible bugs in the game. 

I can't say I'm surprised. Other than Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order's success, modern EA's been one big screw up after another.

Will any of this really matter though, or will it still sell the same amount? TLOU2 and Pokemon show that user reviews at least don't matter much. We'll see if a combination of poor user and critic reviews will.

Until the game sells only like 1-2M units, none f this actually matters.

Truth is, the gamers are the ones that are goofing if anything. We are the only reason that companies like EA still exist.

Hasn't that killed certain gaming franchises?

Yeah, as long as the same people buy it (and its microtransactions) nothing is going to change.

Pretty accurate. Jedi: Fallen Order was great, and I personally thought Battlefront 2 was great after they redesigned it and removed the lootboxes (though the fact that the lootboxes were present to start with was a pretty big screw up), and Apex Legends was a big success and got good reviews. But aside from those, pretty much every other EA game the 2nd half of this gen has been either bad or straight up disastrous. Need for Speed sales and reviews went down the toilet over the course of the generation, with the Forza Horizon series taking it's place as the best selling and best reviewed arcade racing series. Bioware has gone massively downhill over the course of the gen, Dragon Age Inquisition was ok though burdened by repetitive fetch quest MMO design, but Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem were both disasters. Battlefield started the gen strong with 4 and 1, but Hardline flopped (ultimately causing Visceral to be shut down) and 5 got bad user reviews and had massive multiplayer playerbase drop-off shortly after release. EA Sports has released disappointment after disappointment all gen, with several of their games being straight up bad, especially Madden 21 and the NBA Live series. 

That means it will only sell 20 billion copies instead of 21 billion.

Do something good a million times, nobody says a thing. Fuck up once and you'll never hear the end of it.

This is good it means its not the exact same game as last year. Gives them room for improvement next year. Maybe they can tweak the next-gen launch versions based on the feedback as well.

Eh... I'm not sure. You'd have to provide examples. ME Andromeda is the first one that comes to mind, but Madden is a different beast.