If you’ve noticed a trend in sports games recently, you’ll know that the various “big name” franchises haven’t been doing so hot regarding their quality and innovation. Easily, one of the hardest things to do in the gaming space is do a sports title year after year and make it interesting every single time. For EA Sports, they were attempting to do something different this year with its title, EA Sports FC 24, mainly because this would be the first game in their line that wasn’t tied to the FIFA label. According to them, their “split” helped get them the most players at launch in series history.
As noted by VGC, last year’s title, the final entry in the FIFA line, got around 10.3 million players within the first week of launch. The new title, which launched on September 26th, got about 11.3 million players by the first week’s end. There is a catch. The number does say that 11.3 million players BOUGHT the game, just that they played the game, which means that they could’ve done the free trial that was available had they been a member of EA Play. So there could be some “misinformation’ going on here a little bit. Not that this stopped EA Sports from tooting their own horn:
“We’re thrilled to have so many fans jumping into The World’s Game in both EA Sports FC 24 and FC Mobile in just the first few days since launch,” EA Sports president Cam Weber revealed in a statement. “In addition to welcoming back millions of our longtime players, new players in FC 24 are up nearly 20% year over year, showing the excitement of football fans everywhere to join the Club. We are building the world’s biggest football community through EA Sports FC, and we’re just getting started.”
FC Mobile was their rebranded mobile title featuring the beloved sport, and it was downloaded over two million times when it launched.
So, does this mean that EA Sports has a runaway hit on its hands? Well, not so fast. First, as we mentioned, some ‘skewed numbers’ might be holding the title back. Second, if you go onto Metacritic, you’ll see that reviews on the game range from middling to bad. Most critics noted that while the “rebranded” title has its moments, it doesn’t try to innovate as much as it should. EA Sports said they would try to revolutionize the game after splitting with FIFA, but they didn’t exactly do that.
Oh well, there’s always next year.
