Jeffrey Brown/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
It’s safe to say EA Sports’ College Football 25 was a massive success.
Circana executive director Mat Piscatella revealed Wednesday that the game, which officially launched on July 19, “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.”
He also noted the dollar sales figures of College Football 25 in just the first month alone more than tripled the lifetime dollar sales totals of NCAA Football 07, which was the previous best-selling college football game in history.
Few video games in recent history have been as anticipated as the latest college football one, as it was the newest edition of a game that hadn’t been released since NCAA Football 14.
Fans waited for a decade to play, and they responded by buying the game in droves.
This year’s version brought more than just updated graphics to the table.
Name, image and likeness opportunities have been implemented across college sports since the last time EA Sports released the game, which means gamers had the chance to use current players with their actual names in this year’s version.
That was never the case in previous titles, as gamers had to download rosters or play with generic players and names.
College Football 25 delivered real players to go along with the pageantry, traditions and iconic stadiums that largely separate the college game from the NFL. Throw in actual crowd cheers, campus sights, fight songs and more, and it isn’t surprising the game sold as many copies as it did.
The release timing in the middle of the summer likely helped as well, considering football-starved audiences were given something to help pass the time before the fall.
Fall has nearly arrived at this point, and the college football season will start with Week 0 showdowns on Saturday. The ACC battle between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland, highlights the opening slate, and much of the rest of the country will begin their 2024 campaigns the following week.
It all builds toward the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff.
Well, the first-ever 12-team playoff on the actual field. Fans of the EA Sports game have surely been playing 12-team playoffs in the virtual world for the past month.
