Electronic Arts officially launched EA Sports FC 26, the company’s newest soccer simulation video game in the beloved series, on Sept. 26.
This latest entry in EA’s largest franchise received generally favorable reviews, according to Metacritic, an aggregator site, with 84% of the 51 critic reviews being positive.
“EA kind of stands alone in the video game sphere in producing a bunch of highly desired games on a yearly basis,” said Martin Szumski, an associate equity analyst at Morningstar.
Hours after the game’s launch, The Wall Street Journal reported that EA is in takeover talks with big-name investors such as Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners. This sent shares of EA spiking to 14.87% closing at $193.35 on Sept. 26.
On Monday, EA officially confirmed the Journal’s report, causing its stock price to jump to $202.05. Since the reveal, EA’s market cap has shot up to $50.3 billion. The deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history at $55 billion.
Monday’s announcement reinforces EA’s strength in navigating a volatile gaming industry even as growth outside its core sports title remains uneven. The video game giant’s success is powered by live-service sports games that generate consistent annual revenue.
The game features two new gameplay presets, allowing players to choose between two distinct styles. Competitive is geared towards player control and features faster responsiveness and consistency for online in Football Ultimate Team and Clubs. Authentic allows for more realistic matches in offline modes, such as Career and has weather effects like rain and wind and better AI defense.
Pedri, a La Liga club Barcelona midfielder, is one of more than 20,000 players across over 750 clubs and national teams.
Concerns arose when EA and FIFA ended their partnership in 2022 due to licensing disagreements. But two years later, it has all but disappeared as the performance of the subsequent releases has been strong, according to Szumski.
But when it comes to EA’s other core offerings like Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends, the outlook is more uncertain. There has not been a mainline The Sims game in over a decade, while Battlefield is getting a new release in October, it is not a focus, as the previous launch was in 2018.
“In the past five to 10 years, they’ve kind of been willing to let a few games kind of sit on the sideline while they really focus on their core EA Sports titles,” said Szumski.
However, feedback for the Battlefield 6 open beta was promising, with consumers comparing it to Call of Duty, another popular first-person perspective shooting game. This suggests that EA has been “doing some work and trying to revitalize some of their non-EA Sports offerings,” Szumski added.
EA’s earnings call in October will be one of the company’s more important ones with the release of FC 26, Battlefield 6 and a takeover that will take the company private, shaking up the gaming industry.