EA Sports College Football 25’s Record Sales Figures Are a Tainted Victory

EA Sports College Football 25 has been out for about a couple of weeks now, and it’s already shaping up to be one of 2024’s biggest sales successes.

Shortly after the title’s debut, EA announced that 2.2 million people had early access to the title. That seems like an insignificant boast, but keep in mind that the only way to gain Early Access status was to purchase the $99.99 version of the game. Yes, over 2 million people paid over $100 to play EA Sports College Football 25 three days early. That’s not counting the 600,000+ people who reportedly played a trial of the game via EA Play during that time.

The game also recently debuted in the top spot on the Australian sales charts, which is especially impressive for not just an American football game but a collegiate American football game. While its full initial sales figures have yet to be released, EA Sports College Football 25 has already more than doubled the lifetime sales figures of the last official college football game, NCAA Football 2014. It will very likely become the best-selling college football game ever.

And that’s been the real story of EA Sports College Football 25 up until, and shortly after, its release. After 10 years of dormancy, EA navigated an unfathomable series of legal loopholes to bring college football back to gamers everywhere. There is undoubtedly something heartwarming about seeing a dormant franchise finally return and enjoy the kind of widespread success that typically eludes such sleeping series re-awakened by cultish fervor.

But that was the wedding, and EA was more than happy to celebrate their new union with the NCAA with all the pageantry such events deserve. Now that the post-release honeymoon period is over, though, the reality of this new relationship is starting to set in.

EA Sports College Football 25 is far from bad, but it’s more or less what a cynic may have expected from the title since it was announced. EA was quick to hype up the many things that make this title unique compared to their juggernaut Madden franchise, and many of those features are – as the company’s old slogan promised – in the game. The problem is that they are built upon a technological foundation that is not only unsurprisingly similar to Madden but frustratingly inadequate. Glitches abound, animations are recycled, and the UI is often – against considerable odds – worse than what you’ll find in a modern Madden game.

What’s especially annoying are the ways those inherited shortcomings undermine many of the new things the game is trying to do. It is incredibly frustrating to turn a small school into a powerhouse when recruits are lost in menus behind broken filters. It’s even harder to turn a high school prospect into a star when the game often fails to properly record their in-game stats. Ultimate Team may be Madden‘s bread-and-butter, but hiding things like tutorials behind that mode in this game really hammers home the message most fans will otherwise figure out pretty quickly: “Most of the rest of these other modes are largely irrelevant or painfully undercooked.”

Like a school that invests more in its football stadium than it does in its academics, EA Sports College Football 25 often sacrifices fundamentals in favor of glitzy window dressing meant to masquerade serious long-term issues.

And that’s the biggest problem with EA Sports College Football 25‘s sales success so far. There is little in this game that cannot theoretically be fixed in future installments. Hell, half the hype for this game was based on the fact that this series has a future again. Yet, anyone who has followed the last couple of decades of EA Sports titles also knows that the company rarely bothers to address the foundations of their titles once they have been established as a financial success. Well, the first entry of this rebooted series is shaping up to be a historic financial success, which is a terrible omen for its prospects of receiving any substantial reworks before the yearly installments roll in.

Truth be told, though, it’s almost impossible to truly fault anyone who is just happy these games are back. Some have waited a very long time for a new college football video game, and others are happy to see the rarest thing you can find in this age of sports game licensing hell: a new series. There is so much joy to be found in the simple act of playing this game, and that has already proven to be more than enough for the millions of fans who will seemingly help make EA Sports College Football 25 one of the most successful sports games ever made.

Yet, with its legacy problems indicative of a fundamentally flawed system, EA Sports College Football 25 tragically recreates the one aspect of college football we could all live without: the preferential treatment given to powerhouse programs whose faults and stumbles often pale in comparison to the money they can earn.