EA Sports FC 25 has not lived up to its publisher’s sales expectations, and Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, has shed light during the company’s latest earnings call overnight as to why he thinks this is the case.
The publishing behemoth said last month that both EA Sports FC 25 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard had failed to hit internal financial expectations, with shares at EA dropping more than 16% last month to boot. Wilson has now offered insight as to why its football title didn’t continue its early momentum, revealing some players were actually still content to play EA Sports FC 24, resulting in lower adoption of the new game.
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While early acquisitions started out strong, post-launch acquisition cohorts waited longer in the cycle to apply the new title, as many stayed in prior iterations. Combined players in our full HD experiences were flat year-over-year. This mix-shift and slower new player acquisition account for about half of the title’s underperformance versus expectations. Softer than expected engagement made up most of the rest.
We’re constantly tuning the game to drive a competitive and engaging experience. This year, after a number of key changes to gameplay, we started to hear more feedback than usual around specific issues with balance, from one of our most competitive cohorts. This resulted in lower than expected engagement into the end of the quarter.
We took the time to listen and validate what we were hearing, and implemented some significant changes to both the gameplay experience and corresponding progression and rewards in a large update that went live for players on January 16, just before the launch of our Team of the Year event.
EA Sports 25 was released for PS5, PS4, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One in September 2024, and you can read our full verdict here.
[Source – EA via VGC]