Publisher Electronic Arts (EA) and developer BioWare’s latest role-playing game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, grabbed around 1.5 million players, but missed EA’s expectations by almost 50%. That comes via a preliminary earnings report from EA, sharing details on its performance for the third fiscal quarter.
We’re still a few days out from EA’s full financial results for the quarter, which will be shared on Feb. 4, 2025. EA expects a “mid-single-digit decline,” and in addition to Dragon Age, the company blamed EA Sports FC 25 for underperforming.
“During Q3, we continued to deliver high-quality games and experiences across our portfolio; however, Dragon Age and EA SPORTS FC 25 underperformed our net bookings expectations,” said EA CEO Andrew Wilson. “This month, our teams delivered a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to our annual Team of the Year update in FC 25; positive player feedback and early results are encouraging. We remain confident in our long-term strategy and expect a return to growth in FY26, as we execute against our pipeline.”
Launching in October 2024, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was the long-awaited fourth entry in the Dragon Age franchise, coming a decade after 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Single-player games face an uphill battle
This news is certainly disappointing for Dragon Age fans, especially since the wait for The Veilguard was so long. The fourth entry in the fantasy series was rebooted multiple times across the years, with different directors joining and leaving the project at BioWare. At one point, the game was even engineered as a live service title before being again rebooted into a single-player adventure.
As more and more of players’ time is sucked up by a handful of live service games, it’s harder and harder for new games to break out as huge successes. In 2023, the only single-player game to crack the top ten most-played games was Starfield. I’ve previously written about the threat of “black hole” titles when discussing gaming trends in 2024, and it’s a problem that doesn’t have an easy solution.
I recently replayed every Dragon Age game while writing a recap of the story so far, and having that comparison in mind was interesting heading into The Veilguard. In my review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I wrote that “The combat is wildly different and the tone varies, but the characters here are the same vital, meaningful core that BioWare is known to deliver. While far removed in many ways from the fantasy franchise I grew up loving, Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes its place by prior adventures in Thedas with pride.”
Looking ahead, BioWare is now working on a fifth Mass Effect game, which is being built by a team using Unreal Engine 5. This game is still fairly early in development, and is not expected to release in the next couple of years. Elsewhere at EA, multiple studios are working on the next Battlefield game.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is currently available on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PlayStation 5.
