EA Sports College Football 25 has become the best-selling sports game in U.S. history, surpassing NBA 2K21.
According to data from the research and analytics company Circana, the game has also cracked the top 50 for best-selling tracked video games of all time. And, it’s the best-selling game of 2024, though Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been the top game of the past two months. (All of these rankings are calculated in dollar sales.)
Insider Gaming first reported the news.
College Football 25 was a dark horse to emerge at the top of the 2024 sales market, says Stephen Totilo, author of the “Game File” newsletter.
“ It was reasonable to assume that the EA College Football return would do well, but it’s a big surprise that it’s done as well as it has,” Totilo told Front Office Sports. “For it to be the top game of the year so far in the U.S. is pretty stunning. You don’t see that kind of performance from sports games. They rank high, but they typically can’t knock off a Call of Duty or a Grand Theft Auto, or something like that. The days of Madden being the number-one game in America every year seemingly have long past.
“But people are clearly hungry for the return of the College Football game. We haven’t had one in a decade.”
A standard copy of College Football 25 costs $69.99. The deluxe version costs $99.99, and the MVP edition is $149.99.
The sales figures don’t mean much to players, who agreed to licensing deals that do not include royalties. Negotiated through OneTeam Partners, each player who opted in agreed to a one-time payment of $600 and a copy of the game, and a few earned additional marketing opportunities. The lack of royalties frustrated player advocates who said the deal undervalued athletes, but without a formal union or players’ association to negotiate on their behalf, thousands of players opted in anyway. (It’s industry standard for professional athletes to receive royalty checks for games that use their name, image, and likeness.)
“I’m sure that there are players out there who are seeing how this game sold and thinking, ‘Man, I could have done more [than] several grocery bills and a copy of the game’s worth of compensation,’” Totilo says.
Despite the success of the game not going into players’ pockets, EA still played an important role in the history of NIL. Former UCLA men’s basketball player Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA is what led EA to stop making its college games. Afterward, the NCAA wouldn’t let EA pay players and didn’t permit any NIL deals until another lawsuit required them to in 2021. College Football 25 is EA’s first reentry into college sports games, this time with players’ names and numbers—and checks to athletes.
It’s hard to know exactly how many copies have been sold or how much money EA has made. Developers like EA give sales data to Circana, but the firm doesn’t publish any of it. Another wrinkle is that Wii Sports may have actually sold better in the U.S. than College Football at the height of its popularity, but the game was bundled with the Wii console in North America, which Totilo says skewed the data.
