Dragon Age: The Veilguardhad a strong opening and plenty of hype around its launch, but failed to stick the landing. AsEAreported last month, despite good reviews, The Veilguard reached 1.5 million players across all platforms,falling short of EA’s expectations by 50 percent. This led to a series of layoffs within BioWare,including key developerson both theMass EffectandDragon Ageseries, leaving the studio athalf its size from two years prior.
EA Thinks The Veilguard Failed Because It Wasn’t Live Service
To hear EA CEO Andrew Wilson tell it, it’s because The Veilguard wasn’t a live service game.During a recent financial call, Wilson said, “to break beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives… it did not resonate with a broad-enough audience in this highly competitive market.”
Further emphasising the point, EA CFO Stuart Canfield commented, “Historically, blockbuster storytelling has been the primary way our industry has brought beloved IP to players. The game’s financial performance highlights the evolving industry landscape and reinforces the importance of our actions to reallocate toward our most significant and highest potential opportunities.” Wilson also noted that 74 percent of EA’s revenue is from live service games, which indicates that the company believes that live service games are the most important in its portfolio.
I’m not sure how this squares with the underperformance ofEA Sports FC 25, as that series is a de facto live service that also did poorly.
EA Is Very Wrong
This is completely divorced from what players will tell you was disappointing about The Veilguard. There’s a litany of complaints, all more accurate, that we could attribute its under-performance to:heavy-handed writing, thesidelining of religion,retconning its own lore, theremoval of world states, alack of room to roleplay, atotal lack of moral gray areas… I could go on, we’ve complained about the game a lot on this website.
A 2024 study says thata majority of gamers prefer single-player games.
But perhaps most ironic is that a lot of people believe The Veilguard suffered because it wasalmosta live service game. Originally conceived as a multiplayer game,EA pivoted the series back to single-player(which BioWare is obviously more familiar with) after its previous live service project,Anthem,infamously failed and shut down. Many saw this as EA learning its lesson. It seems it hasn’t.
There are theories that The Veilguard originating as a live service game was part of the problem. The game wasbuilt on the “underlying foundations” of the scrapped live service, which might be why world states weren’t incorporated to any significant degree – it would be hard to make a multiplayer game work if everybody made different choices. It may also have compromised development because of the wasted resources.
It’s painfully clear that upper management at EA is completely out of touch with its players. I’ll be fair and say that it has managed to leverage its existing properties to squeeze as much money out of its audience as it can. And I understand why Wilson might stand by this belief and continue to say it to shareholders, as this is basically EA’s business strategy. If live service isn’t the way the industry is going, EA is going to be hit hard.
But it really is quite silly to say that players are still hankering for live service games when we’ve seen them fail time and time again. Existing games likeOverwatch 2and EA’s ownApex Legendsmight still be going strong against the odds, but with a few exceptions likeHelldivers 2andMarvel Rivals, new live service games arefighting an uphill battle.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard did as well as it did because it had an enduring fan base andbecauseit wasn’t mucking up the formula by being a live service game. After Anthem’s failure, absolutely nobody wanted to play another live service BioWare game, especially if it was the latest installment of a franchise that shaped conceptions of what a single-player RPG should look like. EA either doesn’t understand gamers or it’s willfully misrepresenting them to placate shareholders, and either way, it’s a bad look.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
WHERE TO PLAY
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
