A storied program must navigate a stacked schedule to stay on top.
EA Sports 26 launch day begins a grueling four-month sprint for Electronic Arts. The company will try to avoid a repeat of last year, when excitement surrounding its first NCAA video game in a decade dissipated by the holiday season.
From Thursday’s full College Football 26 release through the end of October, EA will unload the bulk of its annual sports catalogue—and likely also mark the return of its Skate series.
Last year’s College Football 25 was the best-selling sports video game of all-time. But releases of EA’s subsequent sports games, particularly EA Sports FC, failed to maintain that momentum.
As EA looks for a cleaner 2025 trajectory, repeating last summer’s success with College Football presents a challenge.
“I acknowledge that there was almost certainly pent-up demand, having not launched the franchise for 10 years,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson told analysts in May. “But I’d also say, given the quality of the game that our team built, given the level of engagement that we had from the fan base, those fans don’t love college football any less this year than they did last year.”
EA has touted several upgrades for College Football 26: the introduction of real coach likenesses; a deepened “Road to Glory” mode in which users can simulate the college careers of their own created player, beginning in high school; new authentic game-day atmospheres and program-specific traditions; dynamic substitutions; and expanded playbooks.
Still, social media suggests there is less buzz this time around. The official YouTube trailer for College Football 25 got 3.6 million views. The one for College Football 26 has 1.6 million.
Last year, the number of concurrent Twitch live viewers for College Football 25 streams peaked at 190,000 during the final day of the early access period, according to Twitch Tracker. The early access period for College Football 26 this week, which lacked the novelty effect of being the first NCAA video game in two console generations, saw a Twitch viewership peak of 46,000.
“Given the extraordinary success of the relaunch and the high bar set last year, we would expect some modest contraction in sales this year as the franchise begins to normalize,” Benchmark analyst Mike Hickey wrote in a note.
Actual game sales could still meet or surpass EA’s expectations, and microtransactions (also known as in-game purchases) are a crucial long-tail component of gaming revenue, comprising more than half of EA’s earnings.
There will be little time to dwell on the first test of the 2025 season. Following College Football 26, EA is expected to release Skate 4, Madden NFL, EA Sports FC and NHL games before Halloween.
EA already released its niche Formula 1 title, F1 25, in May. Outside the sports genre, the company delivered a widely acclaimed hit with action-adventure game Split Fiction in March, and it plans to release a new version of popular war simulator Battlefield with a rumored budget beyond $400 million either late this year or early next year.
The publisher has not provided a recent update on the future of its UFC franchise, though it has confirmed a college basketball video game revival is in the works, reportedly with a 2028 target.
EA’s stock is up 4.3% in 2025, rising to $152.68 per share entering Thursday’s market open despite a brief January plummet to $115 that followed concerns about EA Sports FC’s in-game spending levels.
The company’s market performance trails the Nasdaq, which is up about 6%. But there is optimism: Hickey gives EA a $180 price target and “buy” rating.
Most of the other big-name publicly traded companies in the video game industry have crushed major indexes this year. That’s been based on high hopes for hardware with the release of the Nintendo Switch 2 console, and a belief by some analysts that this is an entertainment category resistant to broader economic downturns.
Take-Two Interactive, the maker of the NBA 2K franchise and arguably EA’s top rival, has seen its stock gain more than 30% in 2025. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, the makers of the three best-selling consoles worldwide, are all up double-digit percentages. Roblox, the platform that lets users create and play games, has surged more than 80%.
