EA Sports College Football: The Unrivaled Champion of Sports Game Sales in the U.S.
Nonetheless, expenditure on video games fell 7% to $5.8 billion in a CODless November, while PS5 Pro sold fewer units yet generated more revenue than PS4 Pro.
Electronic Arts’ college football title has now become the highest-selling sports video game in U.S. history based on dollar sales.
This is primarily derived from the November report by Circana, which also indicates that EA Sports College Football 25 ranks among the top 50 best-selling games of all time by the same metric. Furthermore, it is the highest-selling game for the year thus far in the U.S.
Promotional events propelled the title back into the Top Ten of the monthly rankings, only surpassed by Madden NFL 25 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
The latter was identified as a significant factor contributing to the year-on-year decline in spending last month, which dropped 7% to $5.8 billion. November 2024 faced a comparison with the launch month of Modern Warfare 3, while Black Ops 6 was released in October. This year’s Call of Duty has become the second highest-selling title of 2024 so far.
In contrast, the most notable new release was Mario & Luigi: Brothership at No.7 (though this does not account for digital sales since Nintendo does not disclose this information). The only other new entries in the Top 20 were the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 3 at No.12 and EA’s My Sims: Cozy Bundle at No.19.
Expenditure on video game content—including merchandise, subscriptions, and more—declined 9% year-on-year to $4.5 billion, with console content being the primary source of this drop, down 29% compared to November 2023.
Hardware spending remained stable at $927 million, with a 15% increase for PlayStation 5 helping offset the 29% decline for Xbox and a 3% decrease for the Switch.
The new PS5 Pro console accounted for 19% of all units sold for Sony. Revenue from the upgraded console was over 50% higher than the initial sales of PS4 Pro, which debuted in November 2016, yet unit sales were down 12%.
Overall, 2.4 million consoles were sold in November 2024, marking a 4% increase compared to the same month last year. Year-to-date, hardware sales are tracking behind at 9.4 million units compared to 11.8 million.
Here are the top 20 selling games from November 3 to 30,