EA FC 25 misses goal with half a billion dollar financial fumble

Lamine Yamal in Barcelona kit on pitch in EA FC 25Dexerto/EA

EA FC 25 sits at the top of the publisher’s list of reasons that projected financial outcomes will fall half a billion dollars short of expectations.

Our four-star review of EA FC 25 calls it a game waiting to reach its potential and close to four months after its release, it looks like it’s still waiting. Game-breaking bugs and network issues hampered the game’s early release but it has made something of a comeback in recent weeks.

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Despite player complaints about a suspected crackdown on community-driven rules, the addition of Tile Update 8 was hailed as the best patch in franchise history. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have made a major impact on the game’s overall financial performance.

Initially reported by Bloomberg, EA has put the lion’s share of the blame on EA FC 25 for a drastic adjustment in the company’s expected earnings. The publisher has lowered its projected bookings by roughly half a billion dollars for the 2025 fiscal year.

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EA Sports FC 25EA
EA FC 25 has had a recent turnaround in terms of player perception.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is also reported to have ‘underperformed’

In a statement from the publisher on January 22, 2025, it was revealed that it had reduced its projected bookings to a range of $7 billion to $7.15 billion for the current fiscal year. An approximate half-billion-dollar drop from initial expectations of between $7.5 billion and $7.8 billion.

This came after the company reported bookings of $2.22 billion in the last quarter which fell short of the $2.4 billion to $2.55 billion range that EA expected. A large portion of this was attributed to EA FC 25 which didn’t meet expected sales or in-game spending.

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Another contributor was EA’s other holiday offering; Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Bioware’s latest RPG was reported to have amassed 1.5 million players between its release on October 31, 2024, and the end of the financial quarter on December 31, 2024.

This missed EA’s expectations by around 50% and was likely the result of the game’s troubled development and pre-release backlash. Despite the setbacks, the publisher expects to bounce back.

“We remain confident in our long-term strategy and expect a return to growth in FY26, as we execute against our pipeline,” CEO Andrew Wilson qualified when speaking on the unexpected downturn.

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