College Football 25 was the most highly-anticipated sports video game of all-time. EA Sports grossed an astonishing amount of money on the first day of the three-day release.
Although the exact financial numbers are not public information as of yet, we can do approximate math!
It has been more than a decade since NCAA14 dropped for the PS4 and XBOX 360. A lawsuit filed against the governing body of college sports by former UCLA basketball standout Ed O’Bannon put an end to the beloved series shortly thereafter. College athletes demanded proper compensation for their Likenesses and the video game was a big part of that conversation.
The long legal battle ultimately led to the NIL system, which came to exist on July 1, 2021. Players can get paid for their Name, Image and Likeness so the game was able to return.
EA Sports took a few years to make sure that the game lives up to the hype. By all accounts, it does.
However, not everybody who preordered the game has yet to play the game! There was a three-tiered release. Those who paid up for the deluxe edition of EA Sports College Football 25, purchased the MVP bundle with Madden 25 or have early access through EA Play were able to play on Monday. The standard version of the game is available at midnight on Friday.
Monday’s launch was so insane that EA’s servers crashed shortly after the game went live. There were more than seven hundred thousand (!!) people playing online as of 10:00 p.m. EST.
That number doesn’t even include the people who were playing, but not online. It’s not at all crazy to think that one million college football fans had a controller in their hands on Monday night.
Even going off of the 713,974 number — EA Sports made a lot of money!
The two early access packages cost either $100 or $150. Let’s split the difference and say $125.
714,000 online players multiplied by $125 equals $89,250,000. EA sports made no less than $89 million from its early release on Monday. There is a high probability that the actual number is greater than $100 million, if not closer to $150/200 million.
Although we don’t have the exact stats, it is already safe to say that College Football 25 is the highest-grossing sports video game of all-time in a single day, and probably one of the 10 fastest selling video games of all-time. The number of copies sold is only going to grow in the coming days and weeks!