In an encouraging display, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launch titles Madden NFL 25 and FIFA 14 both matched or surpassed their last-generation counterparts when they arrived in November 2013.

'We did it early enough that the game teams right now are not fighting the engine.'

'We definitely learned from the last transition where we didn't manage our technology well, and it's something where we took a real key focus on,' said Frank Gibeau, then the president of EA Labels, in an interview with Polygon before E3 2013. EA officials insisted that this time around, the company wouldn’t make the same mistake. At the time, EA Sports executives promised that the company had learned its lessons from the prior console transition, when the publisher’s first sports games on the Xbox 360 weren’t nearly as full-featured as their previous-generation counterparts. It’s been more than three years since Electronic Arts unveiled its Ignite engine during Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal event.