EA Sports have announced that, since June 2008, gamers have played 500 million online matches with games released under their label, which represents a 175 percent increase in online play over last year, deftly highlighting “the radical shift that we’ve helped pioneer in the industry,” says EA Sports President Peter Moore.

This number has been helped along by the 2.4 million registered online users of Madden NFL and Fifa 09 (each), while four other EA Sports titles enjoy 500 000 registered users.

Another factor that handily boosted the number of EA Sports online matches would be this year’s release of the Ultimate Team mode for Fifa 09, which EA say has “sparked the highest online activity for FIFA 09 in the lifecycle of the product.” Moore sent out a rallying cry of further encouragement by commenting:

“EA Sports is committed to providing personal access to the emotion of sports by continuing to create immersive online features, compelling new downloadable content and daily real-time stats updates.”

Those 500 million online matches, EA claim, add up to 4 billion minutes of online play since June last year.