Dragon Age : Veilguard reached 1.5 million players, 50% less than EA's expectations

LordCBH said:
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Iirc, it never went over 100, 000 players on Steam - if that's correct, I can see why the wording is "reached" 1.5 million players. I doubt this game sold over a million across all platforms.
 
Steam DB shows it getting lower. The lows in the middle of the night are now at 1,600 - 1,700 CCU.

As a side note, Star Wars Outlaws daily low just a touch over 200 CCU. It'll be in the 100s range any day now.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
EA is a big company. And so are all the big TV and movie companies. They all seem to have shit tons of money to burn on all these DEI projects. When they fail they all seem to have another one in the works like an assembly line.

At some point, you'd think the money will run dry for dumb products. The company will survive of course, but at least someone crack down on bad spending. Nope. It keeps going. At least Disney seems to be turning around. Their kids cartoon movies have been on fire lately where they had zero DEI or woke.

But like any company. All comes down to if they keep it going or change. According to EA, a month or two ago Bioware claimed the next ME would be back to basics and more gritty or something. Well, we will have to see if thats true. Could be all talk.
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Much like all the "return to form" reviews for Veilguard, I have doubts about the truthfulness of this. There's the issue of capability too.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
EA is a big company. And so are all the big TV and movie companies. They all seem to have shit tons of money to burn on all these DEI projects. When they fail they all seem to have another one in the works like an assembly line.

At some point, you'd think the money will run dry for dumb products. The company will survive of course, but at least someone crack down on bad spending. Nope. It keeps going. At least Disney seems to be turning around. Their kids cartoon movies have been on fire lately where they had zero DEI or woke.

But like any company. All comes down to if they keep it going or change. According to EA, a month or two ago Bioware claimed the next ME would be back to basics and more gritty or something. Well, we will have to see if thats true. Could be all talk.
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You may think that this was directly out of EA coffers. In fact, we paid for it. The federal government was incentivizing companies that pushed DEI / GSP initiatives by offering tax breaks and or government grants. You will see that at the end of these four years the whole DEI talk, and company initiatives will disappear like a fart in the wind as the federal money dries up.
 
PleazureDome said:
For those who like to read and need more color on the stock crash.

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Yeah, okay, Bioware is definitely going to have a hard time wiggling out of this one. Wilson is practically Gordon Gekko. Him, and his board of directors, won't let them off the hook that easily.

It makes it the more amusing that in conjunction with this news, this suggested thread popped up below:

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This game was such a fucking disaster, it actually caused a government to be elected who banned all the gender nonsense outright. Talk about an own goal!

1.5millions still sounds a lot tbf
 
Banjo64 said:
It is a blatant lie that they were projecting 3m sales.

Being generous, that may have been the nuclear, lowest end estimate.

In reality they would have been expecting 8m-20m.
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They're probably referring to the initial launch expectations, just the first month or two, the time period leading up to this financial report.
 
Randall365 said:
This game was such a fucking disaster, it actually caused a government to be elected who banned all the gender nonsense outright. Talk about an own goal!

1.5millions still sounds a lot tbf
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1.5M "players" . Actual copies sold is unknown. Right off the bat, PS and Xbox have home sharing. So anyone dong this with a friend and bought a copy, it could be played by two gamer profiles.
 
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If I was EA, or any other big publisher, my real fear would be that marketing for games has completely broken down. You can theoretically hire better and more talented developers, but if you can't market your game you are on the same playing field as every single other game, indy or otherwise, and are 100% completely at the mercy of word of mouth.
 
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Hari Seldon said:
If I was EA, or any other big publisher, my real fear would be that marketing for games has completely broken down. You can theoretically hire better and more talented developers, but if you can't market your game you are on the same playing field as every single other game, indy or otherwise, and are 100% completely at the mercy of word of mouth.
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This is real. All the "traditional" ways to market are dust. There are no major game mags, or really ANY print mags, anymore. You can try for a trailer before a movie, but the fractured streaming world makes it hard to throw up a TV spot. The internet is a cesspool full of paid shills no one respects and ragebaiters with their own closed circle. Almost impossible to get quality penetration on social media as its a hellscape of bots.

You need a genuine and authentic community manager that can find and retain loyal players, an IP with an active fan base that can be reached through just a few reliable channels, and grassroots enthusiasm fed by consistent developer interactions. You can't just write a check to a marketing team and CREATE this, it has to be fostered via passion, something no "DEI woke commercial 4 quadrant appeal" checklist crap can do because the "audience" they are trying to reach actively hate each other.

I think games need to go back to focused demos than can be quickly downloaded, played to get a sense of the story, writing, and game play, and then lead directly to the full paid experience. Of course a multiplayer only twitch fest can't easily do this and the usual GAAS structure isn't great for a quick demo. Those games are just happy accidents if they hit big.
 
Hari Seldon said:
If I was EA, or any other big publisher, my real fear would be that marketing for games has completely broken down. You can theoretically hire better and more talented developers, but if you can't market your game you are on the same playing field as every single other game, indy or otherwise, and are 100% completely at the mercy of word of mouth.
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The whole point of buying a name like Bioware is that the customer base is loyal and will actively go look for their games. This game just wasn't appealing enough to their loyal customers and the more they spent on pointless "influencers" and ads the more money they would have flushed down the drain.
 
Complistic said:


4 Ubisoft's lol
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Concords and Ubisofts being units of measure was definitely not in my 2024 and 2025 bingo cards.

iQuasarLV said:
You may think that this was directly out of EA coffers. In fact, we paid for it. The federal government was incentivizing companies that pushed DEI / GSP initiatives by offering tax breaks and or government grants. You will see that at the end of these four years the whole DEI talk, and company initiatives will disappear like a fart in the wind as the federal money dries up.
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There will be a handful of corporations that will fight tooth and nail to keep DEI alive, just in a different name and deeply embedded into the corporate culture (see BRIDGE). This is where consumers need to do their due diligence and tread carefully.
 
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Jigsaah said:
Is Veilguard a continuation of the story from Inquisition?
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Kind of. They killed Solas (right away) who is coming from Dragon Age Inquisition. But it was supposed to be a direct follow up.
At least based on my understanding. I didn't play the game. I'm waiting for it to drop below 20.
 
As I said on Twitter, I have no idea how they didn't foresee this. They must be in their own little DEI closed off world because everyone who saw the original trailer knew this was some woke 'Disney' nonsense. I can deal with a little bit of wokeness from new games like girl bosses and shit, BUT where I draw the line is shit like women removing their tits SURGERY scars in a dark fantasy game. That's what Dragon Age used to be. A DARK FANTASY GAME and DA:V is NOT THAT at all. It's a Disney-fied open world RPG that deals with 2024 issues which is fucking stupid. How nobody stepped in and said, wait a second, what we are making here is NOT in any way shape or form a Dragon Age game. We are making this game for fans of the other games and of course to bring new people to the franchise but we're going to piss off the fans if we do a complete 180. I play games to get an escape from the real world, not be reminded of how fucked we are. I didn't even love Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition that much, I mean they were good, but they don't hold a candle to Origins, but I still bought those day 1. This is the first DA game that I skipped on release and to this day still haven't played. I will probably buy it when it's super cheap like under $20 but even then, I know the game is going to make me more mad than happy and I don't know if it's worth going through.
 
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This gaming bombing hard shows people dont want DEI/woke in games. And not just missing expectations by a bit. Off by 50%.

Some gamers will bring up.... "It's not the woke stuff bombing it. It's a bad game from the start, thats why".

Well Veilguard has an 82 rating on Metacritic which is still pretty good. A few pts lower than some past DA games, but actually 3 pts higher than DA II. So the game's MC score is within the ballpark scores of a typical DA game.

And it still bombed. Lets face it. The laughs and memes this game got which included hilarious DEI antics contributed to it. Not solely though. Fortnite graphics doesnt help either. But I dont get a sense DA gamers are the type who like politics or barve push ups.
 
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Trying to imagine a Gordon Gekko hedge fund guy, snapping his suspenders and demanding an explanation for the stock crash, and an intern showing him the cutscene where the non binary horned character does push ups for misgendering someone.
 
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SRTtoZ said:
As I said on Twitter, I have no idea how they didn't foresee this. They must be in their own little DEI closed off world because everyone who saw the original trailer knew this was some woke 'Disney' nonsense. I can deal with a little bit of wokeness from new games like girl bosses and shit, BUT where I draw the line is shit like women removing their tits SURGERY scars in a dark fantasy game. That's what Dragon Age used to be. A DARK FANTASY GAME and DA:V is NOT THAT at all. It's a Disney-fied open world RPG that deals with 2024 issues which is fucking stupid. How nobody stepped in and said, wait a second, what we are making here is NOT in any way shape or form a Dragon Age game. We are making this game for fans of the other games and of course to bring new people to the franchise but we're going to piss off the fans if we do a complete 180. I play games to get an escape from the real world, not be reminded of how fucked we are. I didn't even love Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition that much, I mean they were good, but they don't hold a candle to Origins, but I still bought those day 1. This is the first DA game that I skipped on release and to this day still haven't played. I will probably buy it when it's super cheap like under $20 but even then, I know the game is going to make me more mad than happy and I don't know if it's worth going through.
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The first trailer was basically a fantasy guardians of the galaxy, tbh I thought enough people still consumed that slop for it to be semi-successful while alienating the original DAO audience.
 
This game always looked completely unappealing to me. The art style was terrible and completely ruined the atmosphere, gameplay looked like nothing special. What was left? They just made a kind of sequel not many wanted and they paid the consequences...also the series has been left dormant for too long so new generations of players don't care for the IP.
 
With some twisted woke agenda directors and development team gone of DA:VG. There is hope for a good Mass effect game and the next DA game.
 
The Worst selling dragon's game in 2024

1. Dragon Ball Sparking Zero - 3m in day 1
2. Dragon's Dogma - 3.3m in 2024
3. Dragon Quest 3 Remake - 2m in 3 weeks
4. Dragon Age Veilguard - 1m in 2024
 
Overwhelming majority of customers-"We do not like this, and will not buy/use your product."

Tiny, insignificant, mentally ill customer base-"I love this, its amazing, it fits my fucked up, bananas worldview, but I won't buy it anyway, because I have no money. Fuck capitalism!"

Business-"Welp, the choice is obvious. Let's lose a fuckton of money!"

Game development 101.
 
Say what you will about EA, their analysist is pretty on point with that 3 million estimate. They know they have a turd in their hand that likely won't sell a whole lot. Which makes the 50% miss even more sad, especially considering 1.5mil is not even sales, just "player reached" which likely included all the returned units and free subscription players. The real sale is probably just around 1 million.
 
Gaiff said:
Not necessarily. The first few years could have had only a handful of people brainstorming over the concepts.

The budget was definitely large, but it could have been $150M or $300M.
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Didn't they scrap development of Live Services version of DA4 after Anthem failure and retool that into single player? And that's why it took so long to get this game out the door.

If that's the case they probably had the full team working all this time. So money wasted was pretty huge very likely. Now throw in lost opportunity and revenue lost if they made even moderately successful game vs Veilguard….

If I was EA CEO I would be pretty pissed off about the whole thing and heads would roll. That said only EA knows true number breakdown. And of course they might have written off the money spent on Live Services portion.
 
Nasigil said:
Say what you will about EA, their analysist is pretty on point with that 3 million estimate. They know they have a turd in their hand that likely won't sell a whole lot. Which makes the 50% miss even more sad, especially considering 1.5mil is not even sales, just "player reached" which likely included all the returned units and free subscription players. The real sale is probably just around 1 million.
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Yeah that surprised me. 3 million is pretty low for a follow-up to a 12M seller (Inquisition). I bet that even with 3M sales they wouldn't have recouped all the investment they made in this game considering they rebooted it twice.

This was probably something like "OK we need to just finish this game and ship so we can recoup some of our investment and move on to a new project, we may ONLY sell 3 million but that's better than 0"
 
EviLore said:
Take beloved franchise
Reimagine as worst thing possible
Sink entire studio
Move to next company

It's not a victory for gamers until it stops happening.
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And it's about to happen to the next (and last) Mass Effect game in a few years consuming the same basic crowd is working on that.
 
StereoVsn said:
Didn't they scrap development of Live Services version of DA4 after Anthem failure and retool that into single player? And that's why it took so long to get this game out the door.

If that's the case they probably had the full team working all this time. So money wasted was pretty huge very likely. Now throw in lost opportunity and revenue lost if they made even moderately successful game vs Veilguard….

If I was EA CEO I would be pretty pissed off about the whole thing and heads would roll. That said only EA knows true number breakdown. And of course they might have written off the money spent on Live Services portion.
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en.wikipedia.org

Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Just check out the section about development, talk about a clusterfuck.

Started development as a single player game in 2015, put on hold so the team could help out with Andromeda, eventually got canceled because they wanted a live service game they could monetize instead. So they started working on a live service DA game that would share code with Anthem. Then after Anthem bombed they reworked DA4 into single player game.

And there was MASSIVE turnover with many high profile departures (including Mark Laidlaw who left when they canceled the original single player DA4).


Yeah…. this wasn't some "most of the development time it was just a small crew until it really ramped up a couple years ago" type deal.
 
DonkeyPunchJr said:
en.wikipedia.org

Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Just check out the section about development, talk about a clusterfuck.

Started development as a single player game in 2015, put on hold so the team could help out with Andromeda, eventually got canceled because they wanted a live service game they could monetize instead. So they started working on a live service DA game that would share code with Anthem. Then after Anthem bombed they reworked DA4 into single player game.

And there was MASSIVE turnover with many high profile departures (including Mark Laidlaw who left when they canceled the original single player DA4).


Yeah…. this wasn't some "most of the development time it was just a small crew until it really ramped up a couple years ago" type deal.
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Damn, this sounds very expensive and talk about Opportunity Cost.
 
EA could have gone the easy route and just made a by-the-numbers HD sequel to DA:O. A small AAA team could bang out something of that scope in 18 months. I bet it would have sold better than the turd we got, even with reduced graphics.
 
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