The publisher announced 29 September 2023 as the kickoff date for EA Sports FC 24 on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch. EA said the game would offer the most “true-to-football” experience yet with features like HyperMotionV, PlayStyles optimised by Opta, and a “revolutionised” Frostbite Engine reinventing how over 19,000 authentic players moved, played and looked. Two versions of the game are now available to pre-order — the Standard Edition and Ultimate Edition. The first includes the base game with a handful of features such as additional Player Career personality points and a 5-star coach available for hire in One Manager Career mode.
Ultimate Edition pre-orders get 4,600 FC points, up to seven days early access, and an untradeable UEFA Champions League or UEFA Women’s Champions League Ultimate Team Hero Item, among other bonuses. In South Africa, the pre-order price for the Standard Edition is R1,100, while the Ultimate Edition costs R1,500. The Ultimate Edition will also be available on the EA Play Pro subscription service on Windows at launch — which costs R200 per month in South Africa. Subscribers on the regular EA Play plan — which is included with Xbox Game Pass — can get a 10% discount on either edition of the game. Although not included with PlayStation Plus, owners of Sony’s console can also subscribe to EA Play as a separate subscription. Nintendo Switch users can only order the Standard Edition at R999.95. Alongside the launch date announcement, EA released the first “gameplay” trailer for EA Sports FC 24.
Dropping Fifa from the game’s title and in-game content comes after EA and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) ended a decades-long partnership last year. Reports suggest that Fifa wanted EA to pay a $250 million (R4.52 billion) annual licencing fee to use its brand. The total cost of the four-year deal would have been $1 billion (R18.07 billion). To put that into perspective, the organisation made close to $5.77 billion in 2022, a World Cup year. $150 million (R2.71 billion) of that revenue came from the EA licencing deal. The first-ever football video game from EA — Fifa International Soccer — was released in December 1993 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console. It was ported to multiple other systems and platforms — including MS-DOS, Game Boy, Super NES, and Master System.
