• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Dragon Age: Veilguard releases with over 70k concurrent players on Steam and 'Mixed Reviews'

Loboxxx

Member
I think this time there is a mix between fans of the classic Dragon Ages, who don't want this Batman Arkham approach or this Disney adventure tone, and those who are fed up with the forced and uncomfortable inclusion (call it woke if you want), which is very present in this case.

It's a shame, because the game is very good, but they made some bad decisions.
 

clarky

Gold Member
there is something weird with the numbers

this game started at 22K at release and climb up to its first day peak at 76k. that is almost like 250% increase. i think this is not normal for a AAA game. this kind of increase is usually seen on indies or niche games that break out in popularity/word of mouth . (which is achieved further down the line).

what i think is that the game didn't have a lot of hype (release number on steam) , but a lot of people ended up playing it the first day of release (first day peak numbers). Positive reviews from media, old IP and eager fans?

the subsequent numbers i think imply that the game is struggling to attract new players...the word of mouth is not good.
It had no preload, thats why it started low and increased the way it did.
 
Last edited:

Lord Panda

The Sea is Always Right
Meanwhile, an actual good game with 0 marketing:

b8MG0vj.png

And has been out forever
 
Game is doing atrociously on the console achievement tracking sites, for however much that's worth. A comparison with Dragon Age Inquisition from Trueachievements and TrueTrophies

Xbox:
Inquisition: 288K (360 & One)
Veilguard: 8K

Playstation:
Inqusition 111K (PS3 & PS4)
Veilguard: 2K

I see a lot of people claiming that this heavily skews towards consoles.

Those sites are worthless for gauging sales.
 

pasterpl

Member
That tweet is being referenced because of the caption, we have no idea what that person's sexuality is and it's not purely being referenced because of how they look.
F*ck me, so it is purely on person looks. Great, very mature approach. I don’t like how that person looks so whatever they are involved producing will be by extension bad. All because of the person external looks.
 

pasterpl

Member
Game is doing atrociously on the console achievement tracking sites, for however much that's worth. A comparison with Dragon Age Inquisition from Trueachievements and TrueTrophies

Xbox:
Inquisition: 288K (360 & One)
Veilguard: 8K

Playstation:
Inqusition 111K (PS3 & PS4)
Veilguard: 2K

I see a lot of people claiming that this heavily skews towards consoles.
To be honest achievement tracking websites are quite useless.
 

pasterpl

Member
Can you read or not?
Yes I can read, but I wasn’t me who said that that person looks like a clown. Now you say it is not looks that bother people, which is obviously not 100% correct (look sentence before) but I still do not understand wha it is so triggering about wanting to bring Indiana Jones story to modern audiences?
 
Last edited:

deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
The peak was 89K on Sunday.
To estimate whether this is a success or a failure, we need to know the budget of the game.
And the sales total.

If we pick REmake 4, it got 190k players peak, which sounds ok-ish, but it sold eight million and Capcom is doing really fine nowadays... Except for DRDR, because that was bullshit and needs to be trowed at the sun
 

Thyuda

Member
No, its definitely not...but 90k is also too much imho. The message "fuck off with your woke shit in videogames" doesnt come through very well.
You can bet your ass they hoped for Baldur's Gate level of success, especially EA. Not even 90k ccu on Steam for the new Dragon Age game is by every metric consievable very close do a disaster.

At least it's technically sound, so if Bioware changes the writers, there's actually hope for Mass Effect.
 
It depends how you look at them. Psnprofiles has SH2 at 15,000 players with veilguard only at 2700.

Now obviously these are opt in services but veilguard having a 1/5 of the players is pretty bad.

The only way to look at it is trophy hunters don't care for it. That's it. As far as sales estimations, it's worthless.

If we're to put any credence towards those sites, that means its selling 4x more on Xbox than PS. Which we all know is bullshit.
 
Last edited:

PeteBull

Member
They're not wrong though, this is the most in your face wokest AAA game in videogame history, with right wing outlets that have nothing to do videogames, who have never posted anything about videogames, actually posting and commenting on the comically extreme levels of down your throat pander within. If anyone besides a relatively small subset of chuds cared, the game by all rights should have done a few thousand CCU, maybe 10K or so. 100K though is a bonafide success, biggest SP EA game of all time. No way to argue the game's a failure by any metric, the "don't care" normies and reetards simply outnumber the chuds many times over.
They are very wrong, who buys 70$ western rpgs at launch? Not "modern audience", not women, and thats who devteam made this game for.
Ofc game has terrible sales vs games that were made for ppl who buy 70$ games at launch- us, straight males/core gaming audience :)

Btw, so often mentioned "modern audience" aka woke liberals/professional journos dont pay for games, they are like that unicorn 6'4 blue eyed young, fit, handsome and charismatic multimilionaire- women know there is few of them out there but what they fail to realise is such a high quality guy got abudance mindset, he will never commit to only one female :messenger_ok: :messenger_sunglasses:
 

PeteBull

Member
The peak was 89K on Sunday.
To estimate whether this is a success or a failure, we need to know the budget of the game.
We know tons:
The game's development, which began in 2015, has been marked by lengthy delays, several fundamental changes in design, and high staff turnover.[3][4] The game was announced as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in 2022[5][6] and retitled to Dragon Age: The Veilguard in June 2024.[7][8]

So over 9 years of devtime for AAA huge IP(one of the biggest western rpg), its easily 200m usd, likely way more.



And here we even got article from our beloved woke libtard journo, Jason Sshreier where he describes how important this game was:

The game is so important to BioWare’s future that the company brought in its second team, which has been incubating a new Mass Effect, to help out during the final stretch of development. The Mass Effect team played a major role in finishing and polishing Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Other companies across EA, such as its Motive studio in Montreal, also supported the game.

And one last quote, confirming how bad the game actually is, in his eyes, despite fake praise:

I must confess: I’ve bounced hard off Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I’ve given it a few chances to grab me, but I find the combat and level design monotonous and the story hasn’t hooked me enough to make me want to keep going. Maybe it’s just not for me. Instead I’ll be spending this weekend finishing up Metaphor: ReFantazio, a roleplaying game that has kept me enthralled until the very last minute.

Just like many of us said, game is of low quality simply :)
 
Last edited:

Guilty_AI

Member
Wait....what? Veilguard is EA's biggest single player game of all time? Did I read that right?

How?
Just the highest ccu on steam, he is not accounting for all the years EA hasn't released games there or the times steam didn't account for such a huge portion of the sales. Nor the fact most of their other titles require EA third party launcher, which may lead people to buy the game outside steam or not buy it at all.
 

tkscz

Member
there's really no way to spin this as not a success
You can't see this as a person outside of EA. A video game this big that took four years to develop from a AAA studio would easily cost $100M or more just to develop. This does not include the cost of publishing or the amount of money taken from digital and physical store fronts per unit. This game would need millions of players buying the game before the price drop. Now we don't know console numbers, but these steam numbers are abysmal.
 

PeteBull

Member
You can't see this as a person outside of EA. A video game this big that took four years to develop from a AAA studio would easily cost $100M or more just to develop. This does not include the cost of publishing or the amount of money taken from digital and physical store fronts per unit. This game would need millions of players buying the game before the price drop. Now we don't know console numbers, but these steam numbers are abysmal.
Game dev took 9 years, starded in 2015.
 

asariN7

Member
I was willing to put aside the woke shit since I was a Bioware fan back in the day but that's the least of their problems.
The art style looks disgusting, like something way worse that what Mihoyo would put out.
The gameplay seems so boring and generic, even asscreed looks more fun than this.
Aaand the writing is so juvenile, like they hired some tumblr users that used to write fanfics about Gossip Girl.
The woke shit only made this problems more apparent and I lost all hope for the next Mass Effect game...
 

Dazraell

Member
Game dev took 9 years, starded in 2015.
I was really curious of the development timeline of this game and did some digging. It seems 2015 version was codenamed "Joplin" and was a singleplayer game set in Tevinter and focused around leading a group of spies. Then it was cancelled in 2017 as a lot of devs were shuffled to help with finishing Anthem

Some of the devs who stayed were tasked with figuring out a new version of Dragon Age codenamed "Morrison", which was a live-service game built on Anthem's code. The proper development of it started in 2018 and it was meant to be the same game that was announced during The Game Awards as "Dread Wolf Rises". The development of this game continued to 2021 and went through major rework. EA was convinced to switching Morrison from live-service to singleplayer game, followed with great sales of Fallen Order and Anthem being a flop

Interestingly, it looks like Veilguard still has the Morrison codename on its executable file

4ol7gy2.png
 
Last edited:

lmimmfn

Member
Glad it did amazing, 4.5 million copies sold as of 18 days ago! Definitely well beyond expectation. Besides being a amazing looking game, I think the devs saying they just want to focus on making a fun good game without worrying about politics also boost it's numbers and got even more positive word of mouth. This actually pissed off a lot of the crazies at the time unsurprisingly. Space Marine 2 is the GOTY for me.

Even rounding 89k up to 100k. That would still only be good for AA+ or AAA- games like Stellar Blade, Wukong, and Granblue Fantasy Relink. Lol funny that Wukong would have actually have still been good if they only got around 100k peak ccp with it's 50 million budget.

What Granblue Fantasy Relink got with 115k peak is good. Space Marine 2 getting 225k peak is good. Space Marine 2 seems to be a higher budget game compared to Stellar Blade, Relink, and Wukong so it'll need more than 100k to be good which it did as it got around 230k. Veilguard being another higher budget and production tier compared to Space Marine 2 would need 360k to be in the same good peak ratio of what Granblue Relink and Space Marine got. Space Marine 2's word of mouth also appears to be better than Relink.

So far to how well they're doing compared to their budget and ratio. The best would obviously be Wukong >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Space Marine 2 >>>>>> Granblue Fantasy Relink >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Veilguard.
I bought Space Marine 2 just after release simply because they said they want to deliver good/fun games and not forcing woke/politics into games.

I've not played it yet as still getting through Wukong, I just wanted to support good honest devs.
 

tkscz

Member
Game dev took 9 years, starded in 2015.
Holy shit, like I got nothing clever for that, this could easily skyrocket the game's development cost to $200M+ and that's before publishing and taxes (though I think EA is one of those companies known for avoiding taxes).

For this game to profit it will have to sell ~7 million units at full price. I'm not going to judge the game, you like it or you don't but AAA budgets are starting to reach unsustainable levels.
 

Humdinger

Gold Member
I'm going to wait for actual sales data before drawing conclusions about the game's success or failure. I'm not sure what to make of Steam concurrent user peaks. I hear people saying these numbers mean it's a failure, but I don't know how these numbers equate to actual sales or how sales stack up on the consoles. I know it's the only data we have available and people want to figure out whether it's a success or a failure ASAP, but I'd rather suspend judgment and wait for real sales data ... assuming we can get them, eventually.
 
Holy shit, like I got nothing clever for that, this could easily skyrocket the game's development cost to $200M+ and that's before publishing and taxes (though I think EA is one of those companies known for avoiding taxes).

For this game to profit it will have to sell ~7 million units at full price. I'm not going to judge the game, you like it or you don't but AAA budgets are starting to reach unsustainable levels.

It's been rebooted twice since 2015. Those version will have probably been tax write offs.
 

PeteBull

Member
I'm going to wait for actual sales data before drawing conclusions about the game's success or failure. I'm not sure what to make of Steam concurrent user peaks. I hear people saying these numbers mean it's a failure, but I don't know how these numbers equate to actual sales or how sales stack up on the consoles. I know it's the only data we have available and people want to figure out whether it's a success or a failure ASAP, but I'd rather suspend judgment and wait for real sales data ... assuming we can get them, eventually.
U think EA wont yell at us if game sells well? They always do it whenever they got the chance, thats how we know for example DA:I sales:
 

Roxkis_ii

Banned
I see the game hit 89k last night.

It seems like the number doesn't really matter at thr end of the day. It's people who will call the game a failure to make themselves feel better and people who will call it a successful for the same reason.


For the people on the sidelines, remember, we only have a limited amount of fucks to give. Give a fuck about things that affect you directly. Like your local government and communities and not some online culture war that's a never ending distraction.
 
Last edited:

Topher

Identifies as young
I see the game hit 89k last night.

It seems like the number doesn't really matter at thr end of the day. It's people who will call the game a failure to make themselves feel better and people who will call it a successful for the same reason.


For the people on the sidelines, remember, we only have a limited amount of fucks to give. Give a fuck about things that affect you directly. Like your local government and communities and not some online culture war that's a never ending distraction.

Eh....you seemed invested enough in this to hand out Ls to the "incels" on Friday based on nothing at all. So now that the game's numbers (which do matter) are not that great then you are going to pretend to be above the fray?

Ahh man, did the incels take a L on this!??

Come On What GIF by MOODMAN
 

pudel

Member
For the people on the sidelines, remember, we only have a limited amount of fucks to give. Give a fuck about things that affect you directly. Like your local government and communities and not some online culture war that's a never ending distraction.
This culture war happens everywhere mate...also in local governments and communities. Just yesterday we got a new national law, that everyone here can decide now if he is a woman or a man or something funny...just say it and authorities will change your passport instantly. And I can be fined upto 10k if I somehow "misgender" these people. This nonsense is getting out of hands everywhere.
 
Last edited:

GC_DALBEN

Member
6/10 Dragon Age game from 2 friends that bought the game, if you are a little older 30+ theres a lot of moments in the dialog that you roll your eyes, gameplay is ok (its simplified), the game looks good, sound is ok, ill not buy this one, here in Brasil games are really expensive. These diferent Pronoums thing is common in USA/Canada? Ppl make fun of those who use it here in Brasil.

People like me and my friends that loved Origins are not the target of this game, and thats fine, we are a little older.

Sorry about my english
 
Top Bottom