Graph Not Go UpDragon Age: The Veilguard didn't do as well as EA hoped, but EA Sports FC 25's struggles to score big financial numbers were an even bigger factor in it revising expectationsDamn, even the perennial cash cow that is EA's footy behemoth hasn't quite delivered in the way it hoped this year.Image credit: EA News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on Jan. 23, 2025 EA has revealed that both Dragon Age: The Veilguard and EA Sports FC 25 have both "underperformed" its expectations, though it's the latter of the two that it cites as "accounting for the majority of the change" it's had to make in its financial projections.As announced via a press release about EA's "preliminary results for the third fiscal quarter", the publisher's had to revise its projections in terms of net bookings - basically, the amount of cash a game is bringing in - from anticipating mid-single-digit growth to mid-single-digit decline instead.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Both FC 25 and Veilguard's fortunes in terms of making bank and pulling in the players required to make said bank have contributed to this shift in how the company as a whole reckons it'll do.The former - which EA refers to as "Global Football" here, like people going to league two matches in Accrington is something it relies on massively when it comes to finances - "a slowdown" in how well it was doing in Q3, bucking the established trend of the two previous years, when it enjoyed double-digit growth.Veilguard, meanwhile, attracted "approximately 1.5 million players" during the quarter, when EA had expected it to do double that and pull in three million. As ever in both cases, companies are generally looking to tell a story of constant growth or at least stability to investors and/or other stock market suity types with stuff like this, so their estimates can often be skewed towards their big bets having done the very big sorts of numbers suity types like, and overestimations do happen."During Q3, we continued to deliver high-quality games and experiences across our portfolio; however, Dragon Age and EA Sports FC 25 underperformed our net bookings expectations," EA CEO Andrew Wilson wrote, "This month, our teams delivered a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to our annual Team of the Year update in FC 25; positive player feedback and early results are encouraging. We remain confident in our long-term strategy and expect a return to growth in FY26, as we execute against our pipeline."In terms of FC 25 specifically - which is arguably the bigger surprise here as an incredibly well-established annual big series that's banking on a huge potential audience of football fans worldwide, rather than being a new entry in an RPG franchise that's had a pretty big gap between releases - renowned games biz journo Chris Dring has added a bit more context in a tweet."EA Sports FC 25 was still huge, but dipped in a hostile games market," he wrote, "GSD data for Europe (a major territory for the IP) showed a 5% drop in unit sales vs FC 24."So, we'll have to see if EA's numbers on screens and graphs do see the line go up as sharply as suits always want it to going forwards. For more info on the tweaks that've been made to FC 25 as part of that "comprehensive gameplay refresh" Wilson mentioned, you can check out our story on just that.