New figures prove it: Selling Early Access for 100 euros is a gold business for publishers

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You may never have heard of College Football 25 in this country, but EA’s new sports game is likely to be groundbreaking for EA and Co.

It seems to be a no-brainer business – at least for publishers. For your next big AAA blockbusterà laCall of DutyorEA Sports FCyou simply announce that pre-orders can start a few days earlier – and charge a little more money accordingly. In the case of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, for example, 100 euros to play the campaign a few days earlier.

Netter Bonuseffekt:The release becomes a multi-week event, first the pre-orderers and content creators all talk about the campaign, then they jump into the multiplayer, a few weeks later then Warzone and so on. The release of many blockbusters no longer takes place on just one day

And this is clearly paying off considerably, as new figures from EA show. EA was one of the earliest pioneers of this early access practice; the publisher has been playing with early access concepts since the introduction of the subscription service EA Play or, at the time, Origin Access Premier in 2018.

In the meantime, everything has been streamlined: If you pre-order new EA games in the Deluxe Edition (even without a subscription), you get access a few days earlier.And nowhere is the success currently as impressive as with College Football 25

What’s so special about College Football 25?

College Football 25 is hardly on anyone’s radar in this country, but the game is huge in the US market! Unlike its big brother Madden, the college league doesn’t get a new game every year; the last NCAA Football 14 is now 11 years old! And this despite the fact that college football is incredibly popular in the USA

EAannounced at the release on July 19, 2024 that over 2.2 million people had participated in Early Access. If you roughly calculate that at 100 euros per person, then weare talking about 220 million euros in saleseven before the official launch of the game.

Industry analyst Mat Piscatella states that the game is the third most-played Xbox title after CoD and Fortnite. On PlayStation 5, it reached 4th place (after Fortnite, CoD and GTA5)

Analyst giant Wedbush Morgan has doubled its own sales forecasts based on these surprising success figures: instead of 1.5 million copies sold, it now expects 3.2 million.

The fact that College Football 25 is apparently an amazingly good game makes matters worse. After Madden has been scraping along in the lowest user rating regions of Metacritic for years, College Football 25 achieves a remarkable score of 6.7. The press ratings are even significantly higher at 88 out of 100 points. So there have been much worse days to be a fan of college football.