Dragon Age: The Veilguard might have sold more copies and made more money for EA if it had been a live-service game, the publisher’s top brass appear to have suggested.
Speaking to investors last night following the release of EA’s latest quarterly results, both EA boss Andrew Wilson and the company’s chief financial officer suggested the game’s offline, one-and-done nature was to blame for it not meeting the publisher’s sales expectations.
“In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demand of players who increasingly seek shared world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” Wilson said.
“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.”
After a long and bumpy development, Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally emerged last year as a single-player game. But, of course, an earlier iteration of the project had been intended to include online play and live-service features.
The length of the project’s development is in large part due to the fact that EA flip-flopped on the game initially being single-player, then live-service, then single-player again - a decision taken after the high-profile flop of BioWare’s actual live-service effort Anthem.
Now, EA appears to be suggesting the game should have stayed as a live-service after all.
“Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed icing the competitive dynamics of the single-player RPG market,” EA’s chief financial officer Stuart Canfield said - leaving little wiggle room for how EA sees the genre’s future.
“Historically, blockbuster storytelling has been the primary way our industry bought beloved IP to the players,” Canfield continued. “The game’s financial performance highlights [the] evolving industry landscape and reinforces the importance of our actions to reallocate resources towards our most significant and highest potential opportunities.”
The big, unspoken question here now, of course, is what this means for Mass Effect 5. Currently, BioWare has given no indication that the game will be a live-service. But these fresh comments by EA execs certainly raise the question of whether it is going to bankroll another single-player BioWare game once more.
Alternatively, perhaps we’ve seen the evidence that EA will support a single-player Mass Effect - albeit via the newly slimmed-down BioWare that has emerged this month after many staff were moved elsewhere, and some sadly lost their jobs.
Mass Effect 5 lacks a release date, of course, and appears to still be several years away.
I swear to the holy RNG Gods if they fuck with my Mass Effect I’ll nut punch them!
Fair enough. I seem to recall ME3 multiplayer seeing a fair amount of patches specifically to multiplayer to nerf and buff skills and classes.
I thought that would qualify it with the DLC and time limited events like double XP and such that happened regularly.
Compared to games like Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, or literally any random gacha game you can find that would make it seem significantly less like a live service game.
But I do remember new maps, characters, and modes getting released for ME3 multiplayer at least haha. Support was not as long lasting or as frequent as you might expect for the aforementioned games.