EA Sports 09 line tops 500 million online games played
Publisher touts latest milestone as nearly tripling the online sessions played in the prior year's collection of athletic sims.
A regular NFL season lasts a scant 16 games. NHL and NBA teams play a bit more frequently, with a guaranteed 82 games every year. Compared to those seasons, MLB campaigns are relatively epic, lasting 162 games.
But they're all dwarfed by the EA Sports season, which this week is reaching a major milestone, according to the sports game publisher. Combining the entire lineup of EA's 09 sports games since last June, half a billion online matches have been played as of this week, with the publisher breaking that figure down to a daily average of 2.2 million.
The online gaming feature is catching on according to the publisher, which said it has seen a jump of 175 percent above and beyond what the 08 lineup of titles managed. During an MI6 keynote address earlier this month, EA Sports president Peter Moore talked about the brand's attempts to bolster online play with the release of daily content updates and satellite products to capitalize on postseason excitement.
The publisher also released a handful of other factoids pointing out the success of its sports business. There are six different EA Sports games with at least 500,000 registered online users, led by Madden NFL 09 and FIFA 09 with at least 2.4 million apiece. Additionally, users have spent a cumulative 4 billion minutes playing EA Sports titles since last summer (more than 7,600 years of game time), averaging about 35 years of collective gaming every day.
Impressive as those numbers are for an entire lineup of games, they are similarly put to shame by just one game. Last month, Bungie revealed that more than 1 billion online sessions of Halo 3 had been played since September 2007, with a cumulative playtime of 64,000 years sunk into the first-person shooter.
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