Andrew Wilson certainly didn’t expect his annual soccer game, formerly known as FIFA, to fall short of the publisher’s expectations!

We’ve already written about how Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed, and the other game that failed to meet Electronic Arts’ expectations was, surprisingly, EA Sports FC 25. Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, said in the publisher’s quarterly report that the game had a good start: good quality, stable status, and compared to the previous episode, pre-orders, player retention, and monetization (Ultimaate Team) all improved, but it couldn’t maintain the momentum because there were fewer newcomers and the audience lost interest faster… or many people simply didn’t buy the new episode and played the previous one!

“While early adopters started out strong, post-launch adopter cohorts waited longer in the cycle to adopt the new title as many stayed with previous iterations. Combined players in our Full HD experiences were flat year-over-year. This mix shift and slower new player acquisition accounted for about half of the title’s underperformance versus expectations. Weaker than expected engagement accounted for most of the rest. We’re constantly tweaking the game to provide a competitive and engaging experience. This year, after a number of key gameplay changes, we received more feedback than usual from one of our most competitive cohorts about specific balance issues. This resulted in lower than expected engagement through the end of the quarter.

We took the time to listen and validate what we were hearing, and implemented some significant changes to both the gameplay experience and related progression and rewards in a major update that went live for players on January 16th, just prior to the launch of our Team of the Year event. These actions have been successful, as we’ve seen a strong response to the title update and our event, as well as positive gameplay sentiment indicators from our community. Following the gameplay update and our popular Team of the Year event, we have reactivated over 2 million Ultimate Team players, with all acquisition cohorts showing positive trends,” said Wilson.

Maybe they shouldn’t release sports games every year with minimal updates. But there’s no point in telling Electronic Arts…

Source: VGC