EA has shared its own yearly recap of 2023, covering statistics for its biggest and most popular titles of the year. Perhaps the most impressive of the bunch is EA Sports FC 24, which is barely under three months old.
EA’s graph doesn’t provide an exact player count, but it doesn’t really need to when it says that at least 1.7 billion cross-play matches have been played since its Sept. 29 launch. The Football Ultimate Team has proved incredibly popular as well, with players collectively starting 15.6 million Ultimate Team Evolutions.
Given this game introduced women’s’ soccer to the series, EA also makes a point to highlight stats related to it. 772 million women’s player items featured in the starting line-up for Ultimate Team matches, and at least 373 million Ultimate Team squads include at least one women’s player item.
There are some other niche highlights, too (such as Sam Kerr and Kylian Mbappé being the top goal scorers), but the ultimate take away from this is that EA was perfectly vindicated in severing its partnership with the FIFA organization. People don’t care that this year’s soccer sim doesn’t have the FIFA name attached; they either value EA more or just want to play the newest soccer game available.
Although there are no hard sales figures for the game, EA previously revealed in its Q2 fiscal results from November that EA Sports FC 24 had over 14.5 million active accounts in its first four weeks, and the soccer franchise as a whole had “delivered Q2 results ahead of expectations.”
Granted, EA has very little competition when it comes to soccer games. The only other soccer title on the market I can think of is Konami’s free-to-play eFootball (formerly Pro Evolution Soccer) but while that continues to receive support, the most attention it got was its abysmal launch period.
In the end, it feels like FIFA got the short end of the stick. It does still plan on releasing its own soccer game as early as 2025, but there’s been no updates on which developer it’s partnering with. With EA enjoying a head start, FIFA will need to offer something especially impressive to win over players.
