EA CEO explains why FC 25 failed to meet financial expectations and how it’s fixing things

The CEO of Electronic Arts has given his explanation as to why EA Sports FC 25 failed to meet its financial expectations for the past financial quarter.

EA shares declined by more than 16% last month, losing around $6 billion in market value, after it made a pre-earnings announcement that FC 25 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard had failed to meet its expectations.

Now, in a presentation following the release of its Q3 2025 earnings report, CEO Andrew Wilson explained in more detail what went wrong with EA FC 25 and the steps taken to remedy the situation.

According to Wilson, EA FC 25 started strong with a “high quality and stable launch”, and with “pre-orders, engagement and player monetisation” all up compared to the previous year, but failed to continue this momentum.

Wilson says the two main contributing factors to this were “soft ‘top-of-funnel’ acquisition” – a lower number of newcomers joining the series for the first time – and “a lapsed engagement later in the quarter”, with players losing interest in the game sooner than usual.

He also explained that more players than expected continued to play EA FC 24 instead of moving over to FC 25, leading to slower growth in the newer game.

“While early acquisitions started out strong, post-launch acquisition cohorts waited longer in the cycle to apply the new title, as many stayed in prior iterations,” he said.

“Combined players in our full HD experiences were flat year-over-year. This mix-shift and slower new player acquisition account for about half of the title’s underperformance versus expectations. Softer than expected engagement made up most of the rest.”

Wilson says engagement dropped this year because players were unhappy with the gameplay changes made, to the extent that the company had to take action by launching a ‘Gameplay Refresh Update’ last month which massively overhauled core gameplay systems like passing, shooting, defending and goalkeeping.

“We’re constantly tuning the game to drive a competitive and engaging experience,” Wilson explained. “This year, after a number of key changes to gameplay, we started to hear more feedback than usual around specific issues with balance, from one of our most competitive cohorts. This resulted in lower than expected engagement into 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 corresponding progression and rewards in a large update that went live for players on January 16, just before the launch of our Team of the Year event.”

“These actions were a success, 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 experiencing positive trends.”

Wilson says that had it suffered a single setback in terms of either player acquisition or engagement it wouldn’t have had a material impact on its quarter, but because both were happening at the same time EA had to take action.

He maintains, however, that the issue was “a temporary moment, not structural”, saying the actions EA took have put the game back on track and concluding: “To put this year into perspective, FY 2025 is still expected to be the second-biggest year for the franchise.”