One of the newest releases in the sports genre of gaming this Summer, EA Sports Madden NFL 25. The American football game released on August 16, and has opened to viewership coming from North American Twitch streamers. Although not as popular as some other EA Sports releases, the event has managed to generate sizeable viewership in its opening week.
The game was scheduled for release on August 16, however, a pre-order of the game allows buys to play three days earlier, as is the norm for these sports titles. As such, viewership for the game on Twitch began to pick up on August 13, rather than the official release date three days later. August 13 has been therefore considered the release date of the game for our viewership statistics here.
Since going live, the game has received 919.5K Hours Watched on Twitch. Unfortunately for the game’s viewership, it has been split into two categories on Twitch. A category for the title exists under the full title, EA Sports Madden NFL 25, but another category simply exists under Madden NFL 25. For the statistics in this piece, we have selected data from the more popular category, EA Sports Madden NFL 25. This secondary category has received 849.2K HW in its release week, and its viewership statistics can be explored by our users.
Viewership reached a peak for the new Madden release on its unofficial release date, August 13. Viewership spiked at 37.4K Peak Viewers, and channels on this day enjoyed 16.9K Average Viewers. After this initial day, viewership has remained high, although not as high as the first day of release. The viewership for this American title has largely come from North American Twitch streamers.
The viewership for the recent release was entirely dominated by North American Twitch streamers. These creators are the major source of viewership for the title, and viewership outside these English-speaking audiences is essentially zero.
DubDot was the most-watched of these creators, recording 153K Hours Watched. Although he received the most hours of watch time, he was not the most popular creator. EsfandTV received far more viewership than DubDot, but Esfand spent less time broadcasting the new release. The One True King streamer broadcasted the game for almost 28 hours in its first week, and generated 123K Hours Watched in total.
Flight23white is also an extremely popular North American Twitch streamer. The creator has 2.27M Twitch Followers, and in only 7 hours of broadcasting time he was able to generate 56K Hours Watched. In terms of peak concurrent viewership and average viewership, Flight23white was the leader of the opening week viewership for the American football release.
The other streamers in this ranking are similar. Their following various from about 50K to 500K, but they all received similar viewership throughout their time broadcasting the title. Henry_773 is the major standout from the remaining streamers, as he reached the final podium place with a viewership similar to the leader DubDot, only with fewer hours live.
For a more direct comparison of how the release of the new Madden title compares to other EA Sports franchise titles, we collated the release week viewership for various franchises across the EA Sports spectrum in the past couple years.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in first place was EA Sports FC 24. This football, or soccer, title remains one of EA Sports’ most popular, and one of the few games that consistently maintains a large viewership among their yearly releases. Last year, in the week after September 29, EA Sports FC 24 was able to generate 14.02M Hours Watched, far more than any other EA Sports title.
Madden NFL 24 was able to reach 1.89M Hours Watched, sizeably more than this year’s release. However, this year has suffered from being divided into two categories, and the gap is not as large as it immediately seems. Nevertheless, this year’s release has received less viewership than the previous year. Totalling the watch time from both categories together, viewership still fell by 20%.
EA Sports College Football 25 was even able to outperform both recent Madden NFL titles, with 4.4M Hours Watched received in only a week. The game's release was highly covered by many industry leaders for Twitch in North America. KaiCenat, Flight23white, EsfandTV, and many other streamers with millions of Followers broadcasted this game's opening week. It was able to achieve such high viewership thanks to this wide coverage from many of the industry's largest creators.
Other EA Sports titles, such as EA Sports UFC 5, F1 24, or the EA Sports PGA Tour, have all received considerably less viewership than the American football and FC titles. The new UFC release received only 245K Hours Watched, and the new F1 24 release received even fewer hours of watch time. While this year’s EA Sports Madden NFL release is not as popular as its FC rival, it still far outperforms other EA Sports titles and maintains its spot as the franchise’s number two title.
