NCAA Football 09 and Madden 09 pre-orders have been down this year, but pre-order figures don't always translate to lower initial game sales, Electronic Arts execs said today.

EA Sports president Peter Moore said during a Tuesday earnings call, "We're watching [pre-orders] very closely but I think in a world where we now do a lot of street-dating and we build events around our launches, consumers are feeling less pressed to actually place pre-orders."

He noted that pre-orders for NCAA Football 09, released in mid-July, were down 20 percent compared to last season's title, but now, three weeks after the game's launch, the newer title's actual unit sales are flat year-on-year

"NCAA has taught us a couple of lessons: That pre-orders are not quite the key indicator that they may have been in the past and secondly, they shouldn't be seen as being any kind of sales indicator in the first couple of weeks," Moore said.

EA CEO John Riccitiello concurred, saying, "Pre-orders are not a hard metric of performance, but they are one external measure that we follow very carefully."