Did Dragon Age: The Veilguard undersell or face unrealistic expectations?

This is not the first time I’ve written about a video game that appears to have been sent out to die, and I predict it will not be the last. The latest victim of the business is Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which, of course, was one of the subjects of Electronic Arts’ third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday with CEO Andrew Wilson.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard garnered 1.5 million players in its first two months after release, according to EA — half of what company higher-ups expected in that window (or perhaps the better word is needed, based on the game’s budget). In addition to being available to purchase outright, Veilguard was also available via a $16.99/month subscription to EA Play Pro, and that 1.5 million would include those players, so the exact number of units sold is not known.

“In order to break out 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 in this beloved category,” Wilson said on the call. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”

Many have zeroed in on the “shared-world features” part of this quote, with some suggesting that Wilson is blaming Veilguard’s failure to hit sales targets on its lack of live-service elements. “Shared-world elements” would have been out of place in Veilguard, to be sure. But the part I’m fixated on is that last part, when Wilson said that Veilguard “did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”

It’s no secret that 2024 was a huge year for RPGs. And all of those RPGs had the arguable misfortune of following in the footsteps of the unexpected juggernaut that was Baldur’s Gate 3, which sold 2.5 million copies after entering early access in 2020; since fully launching in 2023, it has sold 15 million copies and is still in Steam’s top 20 most-played games. Andrew Wilson will hear no argument from me about the “highly competitive market” for RPGs. That would have been a steep uphill climb for the developers of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

But the Veilguard team had already been climbing uphill for years before the game hit the market. It faced multiple redesigns, several high-profile departures, and staff layoffs over the course of its 10-year development. The mere fact that this game took a decade to make would likely have caused its costs to be far more significant than those of the other RPGs with which it was competing for players’ attention in 2024. To quote Bloomberg reporter (and my friend) Jason Schreier in his recent article about skyrocketing video game costs: “To understand why video-game budgets have grown so rapidly, you have to understand where that money is actually going: paying people’s salaries. […] So if you have 300 employees and you’re estimating $20,000 a month for each one (got to pay good wages to compete in 2025), you’re spending $72 million a year.”

We don’t know the exact salaries for all the employees who came and went over the course of Veilguard’s development, but it seems fair to say that its budget likely ballooned during its long, tumultuous production.

For further comparison: Metaphor: ReFantazio had a similarly long development cycle, having first been announced in 2016. Last October, publisher Sega announced that it had sold 1 million copies of the game. Not so different from Veilguard’s numbers, except it wasn’t considered a failure!

Let’s go to another example: the sales of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, about which Square Enix higher-ups have been tight-lipped. This was a sequel, so the comparison might not feel entirely fair, but it is from 2024, so it was definitely competing for players’ attention alongside these other RPGs. Rebirth had a four-year development cycle and has been widely described as underperforming after early estimates placed it at 2 million copies sold. (FF7 Rebirth recently came to Windows PC via Steam and appears to be doing quite well there, but we’re only talking about early sales numbers here.)

Another 2024 RPG, Dragon’s Dogma 2, took five years to develop. This game was considered a huge success for Capcom, selling 2.5 million copies in its first 11 days post-release. The game eventually hit a milestone of 3.3 million in October 2024, but based on EA’s metrics and expectations as shared in its earnings call, those early numbers are key.

One more! Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth took three years to develop, and it sold 1 million units in its first week, according to a proud news release describing it as the “fastest-selling title in the series.”

So why would Veilguard be considered a failure by comparison? In terms of player numbers, as our closest approximation of units sold, it’s in the ballpark of what one might expect of the other RPGs released in the same time period at the $69.99 price point. The Metaphor: ReFantazio comparison seems particularly telling to me, especially given its eight-year development timeline. Again, we can’t see under the hood in terms of how much those developers’ salaries actually are costing. But we do know that Metaphor hasn’t even managed to garner as many players as Veilguard up to this point, and when I Google the words “Atlus layoffs,” all I can find is this article from 2024 about how the studio raised its workers’ salaries.

The Dragon Age series was, historically, successful enough to set high expectations for Veilguard — so let’s consider those numbers. Dragon Age: Inquisition arrived in 2014 to a very different video game landscape with different costs. It did also go on to be the best-selling BioWare game of all time, eventually hitting 12 million units — a mega-blockbuster. EA never released the game’s early sales figures, only describing its launch as “successful.” If we go further back, Dragon Age 2 sold 2 million units in its first two months post-release.

All this to say, EA CEO Andrew Wilson and the rest of EA leadership didn’t just expect Dragon Age: The Veilguard to sell on par with the inevitable competition, or even slightly above average. They expected it to be a huge, immediate hit — and they didn’t just expect it, they budgeted for it. Even though the entire year of other comparable RPGs leading up to Veilguard proved the unlikelihood of this, those expectations didn’t change. And then, unsurprisingly, Veilguard failed to meet them.

And so, even though the game performed just as well as it ordinarily would have for the type of game that it is and the time period in which it was released, BioWare still got hit with post-release restructuring and layoffs (the team size is estimated to be just 100 people now) because Veilguard needed to be not just a success, but a massive success. And it needed to become that successful in a year that also had multiple other amazing RPG releases preceding it. And it needed to do that after having one of the most infamously tortured development cycles I’ve heard about in my entire journalistic career.

Maybe the game did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this “highly competitive market.” But highly competitive expectations seem like an undeniable factor, too.

Correction: EA’s press release about its Q3 FY25 results states that Dragon Age: The Veilguard “engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter,” but did not state how many units were sold. This article has been corrected to account for this distinction between units sold and player numbers.