EA sale defines 2025, as economy looms over 2026

As we roll into 2026, I extend my best wishes to readers for a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous year. I also ask you think about the role kindness plays in your lives, and how much grace you extend to others. The world could use more of both right now.

This is the final SBJ Gaming newsletter for 2025. It returns Jan. 2. Happy New Year, and please, find some new games to play!

Sports gaming often feels trapped in a loop: Player enjoys their franchise of choice’s annual release, the hype cycle begins showcasing the changes coming to the next iteration of the series, it launches, and they enjoy until the next season.

But 2025 threw a few curveballs at this loop, and some of these are going to be felt for years to come.

The first is the $55 billion leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts, with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (which already had a 10% stake in the giant video game publisher) leading the transaction. With EA saddled with $20 billion of debt as part of the deal, analysts and other industry observers fear the publisher will end up slashing payrolls, shutting down studios or selling off assets, though more speculation seems to be that EA would be more likely to rid itself of costlier assets in its entertainment division rather than plunder EA Sports.

And with the Saudis expanding their global sports holdings, could this mean an even bigger role for EA Sports under the PIF? This remains to be seen. Soccer sales remain strong after EA Sports ditched FIFA and its pricey licensing fees for in-house branding. The Madden NFL and NHL series look stable as well, with the hockey game getting a boost this year by incorporating NHL Edge data to improve player performance and help it behave more like real hockey. EA Sports College Football 26 didn’t suffer a sophomore slump. The only sign of weakness, if you can even call it that, was Codemasters’ F1 series going into the garage for 2026, skipping its annual release for an update to the 2025 game and focusing on 2027. I don’t view this as a bad thing — in an industry awash in annual franchises, it’s good for some to take a break and refocus development on the most important part: the fun.

My favorite happening in sports gaming this year is the success of Rematch, the soccer game from Sloclap. It’s different than the sports sims from EA and 2K. It’s 5-on-5, with each person controlling a player, not the full team. It’s a more arcade-esque take on soccer as well, and it’s still seeing healthy player numbers (though its monthly active players count is down more than 300,000 month-over-month to 935,000 on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC, per Newzoo’s Pulse tracker). Sloclap’s success is a reminder that there’s plenty of room in sports for games that aren’t pure sims. I’m wishing similar success for Play by Play Studios’ NBA: The Run, a streetball basketball game.

One story from 2025 that I expect to carry over into 2026: The dominance of sports video games. Data from Newzoo showed that sports games are the top-selling genre for consoles, and with 2K already porting its first sports game to the Switch 2, don’t be surprised if sports retains this crown, even with some harsh economic realities shaping up for 2026 (read my next item for that).

Circana’s U.S. sales report for November showed the grim realities of the hardware market, selling the lowest number of consoles (1.6 million) since 1995 (1.4 million). If that weren’t bad enough, Circana’s report said that average prices are at an all-time high at $439 per system. Another worrisome number: Monthly spending on hardware dropped 27% year over year, in a month when people are buying gear for the holidays and full of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other sales.

That’s wild, right?

A few things are happening here:

• The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S launched in 2020. They are, in terms of traditional home console development, old. We’re nearing a point in their lifecycles in which we should be preparing for the next generation of machines. Instead, Sony and Microsoft have been raising their prices, not dropping them. This is unprecedented.
• Nintendo’s Switch 2 launched in June for $450, and while sales look good so far, it doesn’t seem to be having that much of an effect on the overall market.
• Tariffs are creating higher prices for many aspects of hardware manufacturing, raising prices across the board and creating that favorite term of economic analysts: uncertainty.
• Generative AI’s demand for not just GPUs but now other PC components, such as solid-state drives and RAM chips. With PC gaming on the rise, boosted in part by handheld devices such as the Steam Deck catching on in both domestic and foreign markets and sagging tech on the console side (and let’s not forget those tariffs!), these price hikes could further hurt sales.
• The rise of forever games. What game was No. 1 in terms of playtime on PlayStation and Xbox platforms for the week ending Dec. 6? It’s Fortnite, per Circana’s Engagement Tracker. No one is buying a console to play Fortnite, and for others who play Epic’s free-to-play shooter, they’re playing it so much they may not buy other games (or even want to). Roblox was No. 4 on PlayStation and No. 3 on Xbox. They’re both top 5 mainstays on Circana’s charts. One could also argue that many sports games and Call of Duty are “forever games” in the sense that there’s a significant number of players who buy those each year and nothing else, but at least they’re spending in the market. Can’t necessarily say the same for those on mainlining free-to-play games.
• The economy is weak. As much as we can trust job numbers from the Trump administration, it’s bleak for the past few months. The last example of good growth goes back to the Biden administration. Prices for essentials continue to either rise or remain high, cutting down on what folks can spend on gaming and other entertainment (again, a factor in the rise of free-to-play forever games).

This certainly isn’t the “Happy Holidays” sort of picture the industry wants heading into 2026. I’m not an economic analyst, but what I’m hearing from those who watch and work in the game industry that they’re being wary of all these economic issues. This doesn’t even take into consideration the number of layoffs the game industry has endured the past couple of years.

I’m nervous about 2026.