In half a month, EA Sports College Football became 2024’s best selling video game in the United States, according to analyst Mat Piscatella of Circana, formerly called the NPD Group, known for monitoring and measuring video game sales.
Moreover, hardware, in-game content, and accessories sales in the U.S. were up 10% this July over July 2023, and while it’s not broken out by platform or device, it’s implied that College Football 25 — available only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X — may have had something to do with that.
EA Sports College Football 25 debuted as the best-selling game of 2024 year-to-date and was the primary driver of both content and hardware growth on console platforms.
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) August 21, 2024
In a subsequent tweet, Piscatella said that Circana saw a 25% increase in PS5 sales compared to July 2023, and Xbox Series S and Series X sales were up 48%, suggesting some fans excited by college football’s return were willing to upgrade hardware to play it.
College Football 25 launched July 19 and in fewer than two weeks surpassed Helldivers 2, which launched in February, and Dragon’s Dogma 2, which arrived in March.
Additionally, the “MVP Bundle” pairing College Football 25 with Madden NFL 25 (which launched Aug. 16) is by itself the fifth-biggest selling video game SKU, in the U.S., of 2024.
“Launch month dollar sales of EA Sports College Football 25 more than tripled the total lifetime dollar sales of the previous best-selling college football game, NCAA Football 07,” Piscatella said.
The impressive sales totals were no doubt driven by nostalgia for the NCAA Football series, and the decade-long limbo fans went without a college football game as an array of lawsuits reshaped how the NCAA administers its biggest money-maker, and affirmed athletes’ rights to be compensated without forfeiting their eligibility.
NCAA Football was canceled in 2013 after EA Sports settled a lawsuit brought under the old regime of eligibility enforcement, which allowed the publisher to develop a game based on real world players but mandated that their real names not be included, nor could the players themselves receive even nominal compensation for the use of their likeness.
Several lawsuits challenging EA’s unauthorized use of player likenesses eventually mothballed that series. Subsequent court decisions and state-level legislation forced a reactive and rudderless NCAA administration to accept that athletes can exploit their fame and image commercially (through endorsements and other appearances) without giving up their eligibility under the NCAA’s byzantine rules and definitions of “amateurism.”
Actual unit sales of College Football 25 and the MVP Bundle were not shared; but in the sneak preview period offered to those who preordered the game, players were reporting more than 700,000 online to play the cross-platform game.
Of course, it remains to be seen how long College Football 25 holds this position. Madden NFL 25, even if it’s also published by EA Sports, is directly competitive to College Football 25, and as Piscatella’s chart showed, Madden 24 was still in the top 15 of 2024 sales a year after it launched.
The rest of 2024 will also see Star Wars: Outlaws (Aug. 30); NBA 2K25 and EA Sports FC in September; Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Oct. 25; Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Nov. 15; and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, whose Dec. 9 launch date was announced just Tuesday.
Featured image via EA Sports.
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