Electronic Arts is looking for a microtransactions bonanza this fall after reporting its lowest Q1 net revenue from live services since 2022—part of a multiyear stagnation for in-game purchases on the publisher’s titles.
Its Q2 drive starts Thursday with the launch of Madden NFL 26, the latest edition of EA’s highest-selling U.S. sports video game franchise over the past quarter-century. The game has been available in early access since last week.
With longstanding exclusive player licensing rights that effectively stiff-armed competition in the mid-2000s, Madden has printed cash for decades, feeding America’s demand for all things NFL. Half of the world’s 30 most-valuable sports franchises are football teams, and three-quarters of the most-watched TV programs in the U.S. last year were football games.
The company does not typically break out total sales numbers for individual games, but EA said it generated more than $1 billion in net bookings—its preferred sales metric—from the previous editions of Madden and EA Sports College Football in Q4 of fiscal year 2025. Total net bookings for the company that quarter were $1.8 billion.
Most of Madden’s in-game spending comes from Ultimate Team, where users can dole out real dollars on virtual cards representing players they can then control on the field. Using an event-centric sales strategy for these microtransactions, EA releases batches of special edition cards throughout the year.
The question for investors: Can the lucrative microtransactions stream keep swelling?
There has been a slight slowdown in the pace of growth for microtransaction revenue in recent years—it went from $4 billion to $5 billion between fiscal years 2021 and 2022 but regressed from fiscal years 2024 to 2025. Still, spending across age groups has fueled EA’s explosive growth since October 2008, when EA implemented Ultimate Team in a sports game for the first time on all consoles. The company’s market cap has jumped from about $11 billion to roughly $40 billion during that time.
EA’s Ultimate Team setup allows consumers to upgrade their squads to keep pace with online competition—and to do so again and again. People’s virtual card collections do not carry over from old games to new ones. But every year, EA on average gets users to spend more money on rebuilding their Ultimate Team clubs from scratch than they do to buy the game itself.
Nonetheless, EA is looking for fresh ways to stimulate in-game sales. This year, for example, the company said Madden will incorporate new tie-ins with EA’s college football game, launched last month. While it remains unclear how much this will extend to Ultimate Team—the most visible part of the crossover strategy is full-game bundle deals for Madden 26 and College Football 26—CEO Andrew Wilson told analysts on his company’s Q1 earnings call that bridging EA Sports College Football 26 and Madden 26 fandoms was a revenue-generating priority.
Another area of potential growth for Madden, Wilson said, is international sales. As the NFL continues to hold games in new countries during the regular season, EA also wants to build customer relationships in these secondary markets to offset any U.S. slumps.
“Having just returned from Australia and having all of my friends ask me about NFL, I can testify that yes, the fandom around the world is truly growing,” Wilson said on the analyst call. “In the same way we’ve seen growth of [EA Sports FC] in North America as the sport’s grown here. You remember in the last World Cup, North American sales grew 50%. I actually expect that we should start to see, over the course of time, growth in demand around the Madden product in particular and perhaps also the college product internationally.”
EA has seen poor reviews dog its top annual sports offerings. Madden 25 received a 3.2/10 average user score on Metacritic for the PlayStation 5. That was much better than previous Madden releases, which in reverse chronological order received 1.7, 1.7, 0.8 and 1.3 out of 10. The 0.8 EA got for Madden 22 remains the worst rating in Metacritic history among 445 games for the PS5 with at least 50 user reviews.
Critics say EA focuses too much on the game play areas that make the most money, such as Ultimate Team and other online modes, at the expense of features such as offline franchise mode. They also claim there are too many bugs and not enough year-to-year innovation.
So far, though, the reviews haven’t been a drag on sales. Each year, Madden is near the top of the rankings in U.S. video game revenue. It finished No. 6 in full-game sales in 2024.
New EA games will follow Madden 26 in providing more in-game sales opportunities this year. EA will ship the world’s most popular soccer video game, EA Sports FC 26, on Sept. 26, NHL 26 on Sept. 12 and Skate sometime later this year. EA’s chief fall sports competitor—NBA 2K26 from Take-Two Interactive—comes out next month.
Outside the sports genre, EA reportedly poured over $400 million into the development of Battlefield 6. The sprawling warfare series is far removed from its last smash hit in 2016, but expectations are high for the latest edition this October. EA recently flew hundreds of social media influencers to Los Angeles and other entertainment hotspots to help promote the soon-to-be-released game’s official trailer.
Battlefield 6, the first edition of the franchise since 2022,will go head-to-head with rival first-person shooter series Call of Duty, an annual release published by Activision, which is now owned by Microsoft.
Microtransactions work differently for non-sports games like Battlefield; rather than spending money on virtual cards representing players they can use in online matches, users put their money toward cosmetics such as weapon and gear designs. A different studio from EA’s sports division implements microtransactions into Battlefield.
Given its development and marketing costs, as well as recent headwinds in microtransactions for sports games, plenty is riding on the Battlefield 6 release. “We’re all in as a company on it,” Wilson said on the analyst call.
Investors have stomached EA’s slow live services revenue growth with the expectation that its slate of fall games, led by Madden and Battlefield, will perform well.
EA stock is up almost 20% in the calendar year, recently surpassing the Nasdaq’s percentage gains in that timespan. Its shares are now nearly as hot as Take-Two’s after lagging well behind the 2K publisher for most of 2025.