EA says Dragon Age: The Veilguard performed half as well as they expected

[midian182]

Facepalm: There was a lot of excitement when Dragon Age: The Veilguard was first announced, but it's fair to say that it failed to live up to the hype. EA has now revealed that the game had 1.5 million players, not unit sales, in its first two months of launch – half what the company was expecting.

In its preliminary third-quarter results for fiscal year 2025, EA writes that it is revising its anticipated mid-single-digit growth in live services net bookings to a mid-single-digit decline.

EA places most of the blame on Global Football, aka EA Sports FC, which it says that after two consecutive years of double-digit net bookings growth is slowing down. CEO Andrew Wilson singled out EA Sports 25 for underperforming.

EA also pointed to Dragon Age: The Veilguard for forcing it to revise projections. The company writes that the game "engaged" approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from EA's expectations. The RPG was the other title that Wilson said underperformed.

The use of the word "engaged" suggests that EA isn't talking about Dragon Age's unit sales. As noted by IGN, the game was available on the EA Play Pro subscription service, and the company may even be counting the free trial that was part of the cheaper EA Play service in its figures, so the actual number of units sold in the first two months (it launched after a third of Q3 had already passed) could be a lot lower than 1.5 million.

Veilguard certainly wasn't a disaster on the scale of something like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League or Sony's Concord – it was briefly Steam's best-selling game. Many companies would be more than happy to reach around 1.5 million sales in the first couple of months, but EA had big expectations for the game, and its launch week sales failed to reach the same levels as two other major RPGs: Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma II.

Veilguard was one of those games that critics appeared to enjoy more than players, based on the Metacritic scores. Beyond the gameplay itself, it was hard to ignore the controversy around what many called a political message that pushes too hard – the cutscene in which a character misgenders another and does a set of push-ups to apologize, before lecturing the others on why this is better than traditional apologies, managed to irritate almost everyone, regardless of their views. The use of the term "nonbinary" in a fantasy setting didn't go down too well, either.

There is a better, more subtle way to include a trans character in your fantasy game that does not involve a performative apology and a lecture using parlance that has no place in a game like this. This is basically self-parody. It's a shame because the game is, imo, still quite… pic.twitter.com/9XXJ2oCdGd

– Erik 'daibo' Kain (@erikkain) October 31, 2024

Developer BioWare has confirmed there won't be any DLC for Veilguard as it is now concentrating fully on the next Mass Effect game. The disappointing sales likely influenced that decision.

EA writes that it now expects net bookings of approximately $2.215 billion for the third fiscal quarter and an updated range of $7 billion to $7.15 billion for fiscal year 2025.

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EA says Dragon Age: The Veilguard performed half as well as they expected

 

[Burty117]

I mean, considering the writing is for 3 year olds, and they pushed "Political Correctness" pretty hard, Their target audience was pretty small, to have 1.5 million "engagements" is pretty high I'd say.

 

[gamerk2]

Most of us were expecting the game to crash and burn, and stayed away. And frankly...the DA series has gone downhill since Origins, and I'm honestly not interested at this point given it's clear EA has no plans to actually wrap anything up with it.

 

[KingKappa]

I like the metric '1.5 million players', similarly how Starfield had millions of 'Captains'.

Obviously they didn't subtract the players that refunded or uninstalled through game pass from those numbers.

Game died within 2 weeks on Steam, while Baldurs Gate 3 is still consistently in the top 15 or so games.

 

[Watzupken]

Just the screenshot of the 2 weird looking characters is already a red flag to me. Reviewers can give glowing reviews of the game for whatever reasons, but the company will eventually need to face the reality that people don't like it, they won't buy it. So yeah, it is a 8 or 9 out of 10 rated game, but making a loss for the company. The rating means nothing in this case. Also, they can abandon the game because of poor sales, but with the same kind of content where people don't like, it will still face the same fate.

 

[fadingfool]

Previously loved the DA series. The trailers put me off this one even before it released (goofy graphics, marvel-esque heist intros, just didn't appeal to me) - nothing post release changed my first impression in a positive direction. Still playing Balders Gate 3 instead. After Andromeda (I've played through it once - unlike the mass effect trilogy - already done 4 full play throughs) I don't have high hopes for Mass Effect 5. The only thing good about EA at the moment is it is not Ubisoft.

 

[magoid]

Nowadays 1.5 million "sales" would be a good thing for a indie game. For a AAA game with production costs in the tens of millions of dollars, 1.5 is a huge financial disaster.

 

[toooooot]

That means what, they expected to sell 2 million copies? Didn't the game take over 5 years to make? Such project by default cannot be cheap. Alright, let's assume they sold 2 million copies. I cannot believe it was enough to cover for the investments.
They killed the game with director's narcissistic urge to put his or her personality in the game.
And now they asked this "professional" to go. It is a failure, this admission of the game not selling well is an acknowledgement of failing.

 

[noel24]

And single player Days Gone was a failure with 7 million units? How? What's in the heads of those execs?

 

[ScottSoapbox]

That means what, they expected to sell 2 million copies? Didn't the game take over 5 years to make? Such project by default cannot be cheap. Alright, let's assume they sold 2 million copies. I cannot believe it was enough to cover for the investments.
They killed the game with director's narcissistic urge to put his or her personality in the game.
And now they asked this "professional" to go. It is a failure, this admission of the game not selling well is an acknowledgement of failing.

What part of 1.5 million was 50% of expectations is hard? 3 million is what they expected.

 

[hover389]

Maybe make a game that the gamers actually want and stop adding your political propaganda shite in there

 

[human7]

I expect inflation, combined with several other good blockbuster RPGs being available, combined with many gamers' choice to wait for sales (while they contend with their large backlogs) had more to do with the poor sales performance than 1 poorly received scene. This is hardly the only blockbuster game in the recent past that has underperformed expectations.

 

[Jeff Murray]

Their market was not adults, unless they were pandering to the BSC half of the population. There are too many games and developers out here that don't want to urinate on half of their customer base.

 

[dsdqqq]

For gamers, political correctness is not a selling point
I'm looking forward to seeing how many games will be abandoned by gamers in the future