Madden NFL 21 is enjoying excellent sales numbers, this despite players slamming the game all over the internet and leaving negative reviews. Publishers Electronic Arts revealed this information via a press release. The game also seems to be doing better than last year’s Madden NFL 20.
Madden NFL 21 Seems To Be More Popular Than Last Year’s Iteration
“Players have played nearly 50 percent more games in Madden NFL 21 compared to the first week of Madden NFL 20,” reads the press release. Seann Graddy, Executive Producer, EA SPORTS Madden NFL also seems quite happy with the game’s launch.
“After the most successful year in franchise history, fans are now playing more Madden than ever before. In the last weeks, players have shown their passion for Madden with a lot of great feedback and stellar engagement in Madden NFL 21,” he said. He also mentioned that they will be updating the game throughout its release.
New Game Mode Has Seen Millions Of Games Already
This year’s version of the game introduced a brand-new backyard football-inspired game mode called “The Yard”. Conceptually it seems quite similar to VOLTA, a mode that EA Sports introduced in FIFA 20. This press release mentions that players have played more than 17 million games in this mode already.
This will likely disappoint players who are unhappy with what EA Sports has put out this year. One common criticism of their yearly releases tends to be that each year’s game is the same as the one they released a year prior.
Negative User Reviews Have Not Hurt Madden NFL 21’s Commercial Success
The only things that change are the squad rosters and the teams’ kits. All of the backlash that this game is getting seems to be centred around that issue. Madden NFL 21 has the worst user review score of any video game on Metacritic. It only has a rating of 0.3/10. On top of that, 3,680 out of the 3,755 total user reviews for this game are negative.
I doubt that this level of backlash is going to change much for EA Sports. I’m sure they’d like it if players like their game. However, at the end of the day, those same players are still buying it, regardless of quality.
