Madden’s Lower Year-On-Year Sales Precipitate EA Stocks Dip

EDIT: An earlier version of this article claimed that Madden 25 on the Xbox 360 and Playstation was made on the Ignite engine. This is incorrect, both games were built on Infinity Engine 2.

EA saw a drop in their share price after announcing 1 million in sales for Madden 25, a significant drop in numbers compared to its predecessor.

Madden went with 25 instead of 14 (which is the iteration the game is actually in) to indicate that the franchise was celebrating its 25^th anniversary. This anniversary is bittersweet, then, as the 1 million unit sales it accrued since launching late August is below the 1. 65 million units the last game sold in the same period. As reported by GameSkinny, the share numbers fell down in the NASDAQ 3.4 % to $ 26.76 last September 6.

The game was released on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and iOS. Madden 25 is one of the first games to be made using EA Sports' new engine Ignite, however, the versions in stores now were built on Infinity Engine 2. Interestingly, EA not only passed over the Wii U and PC, its spokesmen and developers went out of their way to aggravate Wii U owners and Nintendo fans with comments about the system’s power.

While that whole episode was entirely unnecessary, analysts believe the lower sales reflect interest in the game coming to upcoming next gen consoles. In this scenario, Madden was simply stuck in an awkward position; they had to release the game early in anticipation of the start of football season, and not knowing the release dates of the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, they had no choice but to wait it out for those consoles to be released.

It is unavoidable to speculate if similar problems could face other major evergreen titles coming in the transition between next-gen consoles, such as Grand Theft Auto 5. Rockstar has made it clear their game isn’t coming to Xbox One or Playstation 4, so one hopes it won’t be the case.