EA Sports
The hype surrounding College Football 25 was very, very real, and EA Sports was largely able to live up to the expectations surrounding the long-awaited return of the rebooted franchise. It literally paid off in a big way, as the title was not only the best-selling video game to come out in 2024 but also broke a record that stood for 14 years.
EA Sports released its first college football video game in 1993 a few years before the franchise was officially branded as NCAA Football, and the company dropped a new installment on an annual basis before it decided to shut the series down due to the Supreme Court case that ruled it had illegally harnessed the name, image, and likeness of players who weren’t compensated.
NCAA Football 14 (which was released in the summer of 2013) marked the end of an era, but the advent of the NIL Era meant the developer had the chance to bring the franchise back from the dead. EA officially announced its plans to do exactly that in 2021, and this summer, the 11-year drought came to an end with the release of College Football 25.
There was little doubt the game was going to do pretty well on the sales front when you consider EA Sports raked in more than $200 million thanks to people who shelled out some extra dough to get the chance to play it a few days early, and according to data Circana’s Mat Piscatella shared on Wednesday, College Football 25 raked in more dough than any other video game that came out in 2024.
Year-to-Date Ending November 2024 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content)
— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 9:00 AM
Piscatella also noted College Football 25 is now the best-selling sports video game of all time after leaping over NBA 2K11 (that achievement is based on total revenue as opposed to copies sold, and it’s worth noting the base copy of the former was $10 more expensive than that of the latter when it came out).
Not too shabby.