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Dragon Age: Veilguard releases with over 70k concurrent players on Steam and 'Mixed Reviews'

Topher

Identifies as young
Inquisition sold 12 million copies and was BioWare’s most successful game.

EA didn’t spend 10 years developing (and rebooting) Veilguard aiming for Metaphor-like sales #s. They wanted to hang with the big boys like CDPR, Bethesda, From, and Larian.

I don’t think EA will euthanize BioWare yet. They will keep BioWare around in some shape or form until they have extracted every last bit of value they can from that brand name. But I definitely wouldn’t be surprised if we see further layoffs, restructuring, new management, etc.

Might be the best thing to ever happen to Bioware. But you are right.....the suggestion that Metaphor and Dragon Age had remotely similar expectations is just absurd.
 
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StereoVsn

Gold Member
The starting player count was incredibly low for a game like this. Dragon's Dogma 2 was at 200k the first day.



I don't think Bioware is in trouble at all, but Dragon Age should have launched with player count twice as high as Metaphor.
Frankly it should be in trouble. I don’t understand how it’s not in trouble. All their last games crashed and burned.

- ME Andromeda - terrible shit show in reviews and sales
- Anthem - yeah…
- DA:V - mediocre sales for a mediocre game

This is a lot of money poured down the drain over the last decade for utterly mediocre returns. And then there are opportunity cost as the money and labor could have gone toward actually profitable projects.

If I was an EA suite all the BioWare management would be gone as well as their writers. They must have some good shit on Wilson to keep going.
 

Raven117

Member
Yeah i don't get the chest pounding. Its lower than Kingdom Come a single player action RPG made by an indie developer. Lower than it's peers Dragon Age 2 and BG3 by a significant margin. It's likely to match Metaphor. A game with the visuals of a PS3 game that likely cost a fraction of Veilguard's development budget to create.
Yup. It’s an EA released game where the last one did 12 million, and this has been in development hell. These numbers are terrible. Flat out. No spin.

Concord just moved the window of what fail meant. Few things in gaming history have failed as hard as concord. 80-100k for a block buster AAA rpg from Bioware/ea (with the extrapolation of who all is playing). Is absolutely in the danger zone.
Man if people think BioWare is in trouble with those numbers then Atlus must be about to close any day now. Metaphor did similar launch numbers and that game has been in development for almost 8 years. And no, I doubt Metaphor was significantly cheaper to make, it is also a massive RPG made by a studio larger then BioWare.
Are you stupid or something? This is biowares 3rd flop. It may spell the end (May not, but it’s going to be difficult decision time at EA)
 
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Zathalus

Member
I don't think Bioware is in trouble at all, but Dragon Age should have launched with player count twice as high as Metaphor.
I agree, it should have been double if not triple what Metaphor did. The game is obviously quite average but the concurrent numbers are hardly some mega disaster that is going to lead to BioWare closing. The numbers are probably under expectations but probably enough to shift a few million copies over the next year or two. People have been throwing around $200-$300 million budgets which is obviously nonsense.
 
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The starting player count was incredibly low for a game like this. Dragon's Dogma 2 was at 200k the first day.



I don't think Bioware is in trouble at all, but Dragon Age should have launched with player count twice as high as Metaphor.
Yep and even if Veilguard managed to get 230k ccp peak like Dragon's Dogma 2, it would still not be good since Veilguard is suppose to sell more as a bigger named game and as some big comeback game too.

Inquisition sold 12 million copies and was BioWare’s most successful game.

EA didn’t spend 10 years developing (and rebooting) Veilguard aiming for Metaphor-like sales #s. They wanted to hang with the big boys like CDPR, Bethesda, From, and Larian.

I don’t think EA will euthanize BioWare yet. They will keep BioWare around in some shape or form until they have extracted every last bit of value they can from that brand name. But I definitely wouldn’t be surprised if we see further layoffs, restructuring, new management, etc.
Agreed.

50% of them probably thought this big budget comeback game was going to get close to BG3, Cyberpunk numbers with a unexpecting 600k or 700k ccp on steam but would have been alright with 300k to 400k+ ccp too. They definitely do not want anything below 300k for this kind of game.
 

PeteBull

Member
Neve isnt my type but shes thin and young. if the game was woke, she would be fat and manly looking. the asian elf is pretty. harding is pretty.
Asian have a fricken face tatoo, historically only whores got branded like that, so nope, cant say she is attractive even if we would undo the pixar filter which makes all characters unatractive, harding is a midget with freckles, hard to even think of romancing some1 ingame i would pass on even on slow tuesday irl :p
 

StereoVsn

Gold Member
You're able to look up wage and employee costs no?

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That's more than double what the average game dev earns in Tokyo.

Then there are the additional costs of employment, which typically run up to an additional 30% in the west, whereas in asia/the middle east it's around 10-15%. I've had to run those numbers personally BTW, less than a year ago. All that "protection" employees get in the west, it doesn't come free.
In the West additional costs run over 50% on top of salary. At least that’s the case in US. This is due to healthcare, 401k and so on.

You are probably looking at 2x or more overall even if we look at Tokyo vs other cities.
 
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Raven117

Member
I agree, it should have been double if not triple what Metaphor did. The game is obviously quite average but the concurrent numbers are hardly some mega disaster that is going to lead to BioWare closing. The numbers are probably under expectations but probably enough to shift a few million copies over the next year or two. People have been throwing around $200-$300 million budgets around which is obviously nonsense.
It’s going to be below expectations for sure. Probably considerably. And recall, this is their THIRD fuck up. You are dreaming if EA isn’t analyzing all of this this an eye toward cutting Bioware loose. It’s not the company they bought.
 
Yet user reviews are sliding down (from 80 to 75) because people kinda see that initial 3-5 hours is basically the whole game, including the godawful writing, character assassination and the cold-blooded murder of a setting. Plus I think 85k for a mainstream RPG like Dragon Age is just weak.

And no, the whole 'woke' stuff is the least of the game's problems. I think Dunkey sumed up the main issue very neatly without any clickbait.

Everything that Bellara companion says comes across like she has single digit iq. It would drive me clinically insane having a character like that chatting wham for 50 hours.
 

pulicat

Member
Playstation store placement by revenue

Starwars outlaws
1 week before release
Number 5
1st week of release
Number 5

Dragon Age Veilguard
1 week before release
Number 10
Current placement
Number 5

It did worse than Starwars outlaws in preorder numbers and about the same during launch days.
 

Kotaro

Member
Fully aware. I just don't think Bioware is in danger of getting shut down because of this. Now if we get reports from Circana and GSD that the game tanked completely then I'll change my tune.

Those reports are useless nowadays, they never give us any numbers anymore. Earning reports is the true grade

But we all know this game is underperformed the way SW Outlaws did. There’s no way a major AAA game ‘meeting EA expectations’ with 90K CCU opening weekend

Lucky for them It didn’t flop like Suicide Squad or spectacularly bombed like Concord
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Frankly it should be in trouble. I don’t understand how it’s not in trouble. All their last games crashed and burned.

- ME Andromeda - terrible shit show in reviews and sales
- Anthem - yeah…
- DA:V - mediocre sales for a mediocre game

This is a lot of money poured down the drain over the last decade for utterly mediocre returns. And then there are opportunity cost as the money and labor could have gone toward actually profitable projects.

If I was an EA suite all the BioWare management would be gone as well as their writers. They must have some good shit on Wilson to keep going.

Could be that you and Guilty_AI Guilty_AI are right and things are more dire that I think they are......or more accurately....than I want them to be. I'm a Bioware fan and I'd love to see them truly "return to form". But you make good points and could be their failures are racking up to a point that their pedigree can't defend. I hope that's not the case though.

Those reports are useless nowadays, they never give us any numbers anymore. Earning reports is the true grade

But we all know this game is underperformed the way SW Outlaws did. There’s no way a major AAA game ‘meeting EA expectations’ with 90K CCU opening weekend

Lucky for them It didn’t flop like Suicide Squad or spectacularly bombed like Concord

They are not useless. You are right that earnings reports are the most accurate judge of success, but the monthly sales rankings are the most reliable measure we have outside of that. Certainly more accurate than Amazon.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
I'm a Bioware fan and I'd love to see them truly "return to form". But you make good points and could be their failures are racking up to a point that their pedigree can't defend. I hope that's not the case though.
This isn't bioware anymore, pretty much everyone who made the games you liked moved on. They're just a skin walker carrying it's name and identity, hoping to seduce all the previous body owner's loved ones.
 
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Zathalus

Member
US based websites aren't going to give you the information you need.

Please read:

That salary information is from over five years ago and covers the entire Japan. Atlus, being based in Tokyo, would obviously be higher. They also just did a 15% annual salary increase this year.

All that aside, the salaries reported on Glassdoor have a median of $35k (US) per year. Mentioning “the west” as having higher salaries vs Tokyo is funny as developers in most European countries and Canada don’t make nearly as much as you’d find in a major US development hub like Los Angeles or Seattle.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
Might be the best thing to ever happen to Bioware. But you are right.....the suggestion that Metaphor and Dragon Age had remotely similar expectations is just absurd.
Who knows. There are clearly some people at BioWare who know what the hell they’re doing. The game looks good, runs great, and a lot less buggy than most AAA games these days. But their writers should never be allowed to create anything ever again.

They need to fire Corinne Busche and their entire creative team. And whoever they replace them with should be given free access to testosterone replacement therapy and forced to watch a bunch of kickass 80s action + sci fi movies.
 

clarky

Gold Member
Playstation store placement by revenue

Starwars outlaws
1 week before release
Number 5
1st week of release
Number 5

Dragon Age Veilguard
1 week before release
Number 10
Current placement
Number 5

It did worse than Starwars outlaws in preorder numbers and about the same during launch days.
You can't come to that conclusion from that, there is simply not enough information. Unless you know the pre-order numbers for those respective weeks? They could be widely different.

And its up against COD.
 
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GHG

Member
That salary information is from over five years ago and covers the entire Japan. Atlus, being based in Tokyo, would obviously be higher. They also just did a 15% annual salary increase this year.

All that aside, the salaries reported on Glassdoor have a median of $35k (US) per year. Mentioning “the west” as having higher salaries vs Tokyo is funny as developers in most European countries and Canada don’t make nearly as much as you’d find in a major US development hub like Los Angeles or Seattle.

My man, the raw data is in the linked PDF in the article, run it through a translator.

I have no idea when you're attempting to fight this when we have data as recent as this year regarding Japanese dev salaries at top tier studios:

According to Capcom’s HR report, the average annual salary across the company has increased from ¥5.88 million ($39.3k) in FY19 to ¥7.66 million ($51.1k) in FY23. The publisher also hires about 150 graduates every year, and the average age of its employees is 37.6 years old.


You'll get far more reliable data/information from company financial reports and reports from recruitment companies based out of Japan than you will on glassdoor.

Also, the cost of employment in Canada is sky high because of all the required additional benefits.
 
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Kacho

Gold Member
That's a wrap for today boys

84,832 all-time peak 1 hour ago

See you tomorrow

My man, the raw data is in the linked PDF in the article, run it through a translator.

I have no idea when you're attempting to fight this when we have data as recent as this year regarding Japanese dev salaries at top tier studios:




Also, the cost of employment in Canada is sky high because of all the required additional benefits.
Don't waste your time, brother. Ain't worth the headache.
 
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StereoVsn

Gold Member
Who knows. There are clearly some people at BioWare who know what the hell they’re doing. The game looks good, runs great, and a lot less buggy than most AAA games these days. But their writers should never be allowed to create anything ever again.

They need to fire Corinne Busche and their entire creative team. And whoever they replace them with should be given free access to testosterone replacement therapy and forced to watch a bunch of kickass 80s action + sci fi movies.
Yeah, that’s the frustrating part. From technical perspective it’s one of the better games released recently. Which makes the issues with the content even more maddening.
 

Vlodril

Member
I love how Larian is now this behemoth in rpg space. Before bg3 they got some cult following with divinity original sin (especially 2) but they have been around forever. They kept their head down. Tried different things. Kept iterating and achieved greatness (bg3 is a one of a kind perhaps game).
 

Zathalus

Member
I always approach things from the perspective that people wish to discuss things in good faith,
Oh spare me. You started off the discussion by calling me delusional.

The salary progression has moved from obviously over double, then to 5 year old data, and now we’ve progressed to over $50k US average for a comparable company like Capcom. The median salaries for most game developer and programmer positions I can find for the financial juggernaught in salaries known as Edmonton is 40k-80k Canadian.

Of course I don’t disagree benefits are higher in Canada, but the salary gap between Tokyo and Edmonton seems a bit overstated. If BioWare was based out of Los Angeles I wouldn’t have even brought it up, as the salary difference would have been massively lopsided. But then again if BioWare was based out of Los Angeles they would have been closed years ago.
 
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Nasigil

Member
Continuing to peak higher and higher every day since launch:

54112285826_04fa1b3f5f_c.jpg



"Mostly Positive" reviews on Steam as well. Sounds like a bonafide hit. Glad to see Bioware still has the goods.
It's peaking higher and higher because game was released on Thursday. You will naturally get more players on Friday and Saturday night, unless it's a Cyberpunk level disastrous launch.

But the weekend increase is quite meager so far. Only 75k to 85k? I've been seeing people confidently saying it'd break 150k or 200k on weekend. Might not even break 100k at this point. It will never get higher than the first weekend, people familiar with the topic can already deduct a general final sales number after the first weekend. This is not good numbers for a big IP like Dragon Age.

It's "mostly positive" on Steam so far, and I said so far because it's been steadily dropping for past two days. From 79% opening to 76% now.

Yeah, I guess you can say it's not Concord level failure. But you can hardly call it a success either.
 
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Man if people think BioWare is in trouble with those numbers then Atlus must be about to close any day now. Metaphor did similar launch numbers and that game has been in development for almost 8 years. And no, I doubt Metaphor was significantly cheaper to make, it is also a massive RPG made by a studio larger then BioWare.
I think it's pretty ridiculous to paragonate the numbers of employees in Atlus and BioWare as of indicative of budget, when we have close to zero idea of the internal organization, the use of external studios ecc., but I would like to note that Atlus is subdivided in 3 major departments : Maniac, responsible of SMT, P-Studio, mainly working on Persona and the department in charge of Metaphor : Refantazio, the "recently" founded Studio Zero. A number of employees also supervisors and work on the games realized by external studios but produced by Atlus, like the Spike Chumsoft, Vanillaware and Ark System games. Atlus generally publish at least two title for year, and the last completely new and internally developed game that it published before Metaphor was the 2022 Souls Hackers.
The last new game from BioWare Is Anthem in February 2018
 
That's a wrap for today boys

84,832 all-time peak 1 hour ago

See you tomorrow


Don't waste your time, brother. Ain't worth the headache.
Tomorrow it'll hit above 90k for sure but wait since Sunday is the strongest of the weekend days, it'll have a small extra bonus so maybe pass 100k a.k.a the high AA+ or low AAA- numbers!

It's peaking higher and higher because game was released on Thursday. You will naturally get more players on Friday and Saturday night, unless it's a Cyberpunk level disastrous launch.

But the weekend increase is quite meager so far. Only 75k to 85k? I've been seeing people confidently saying it'd break 150k or 200k on weekend. Might not even break 100k at this point. This is not good numbers for a big IP like Dragon Age.

It's "most positive" on Steam so far, and I said so far because it's been steadily dropping for past two days. From 79% opening to 76% now.

Yeah, I guess you can say it's not Concord level failure. But you can hardly call it a success either.

And even if it did managed to break 150k or 200k, it still wouldn't have been anything special since it should at least be breaking pass 300k preferably above Fallout 4's 470k peak. While Fallout is greater franchise but Veilguard is a big budget high value popular comeback game around a decade later. I fully expect Elder Scrolls VI/Fallout 5 to break Fallout 4's peak.

Although nothing is completely final yet cause Veilguard could be doing absolutely massive on consoles so who knows until we get some more official news. Some games tend to do not that much better on consoles while some do a lot better on it.
 
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xenosys

Member
I think a few people need to face reality : a CCU of 80k+ for a game of this size, scope and prior reputation is NOT good.

Ghost of Tsushima released 6 months ago, has a similar CCU peak, and is estimated to have sold around 750k to 1.5m copies depending on the source. That might be Veilguard's ceiling on this platform right now. Couple that with a Playstation and Xbox release, and it could be doing a total of 1.5 - 3m copies over the next year on all platforms.

For a game with a AAA budget, plenty of marketing, a lot of buzz, and from a reputable studio, that's not good.
 
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I think a few people need to face reality : a CCU of 80k+ for a game of this size, scope and prior reputation is NOT good.

Ghost of Tsushima released 6 months ago, has a similar CCU peak, and is estimated to have sold around 750k to 1.5m copies depending on the source. That might be Veilguard's ceiling on this platform right now. Couple that with a Playstation and Xbox release, and it could be doing a total of 1.5 - 3m copies over the next year on all platforms.

For a game with a AAA budget, plenty of marketing, a lot of buzz, and from a reputable studio, that's not good.

The math aint mathing
 

Kacho

Gold Member
so... there is a big chance the game doesn't break 100k CCU tomorrow...



well... at least is a triumph, masterpice and return to form, to put it simply: The best bioware game to date.

So Jason Schreier blocked some random guy on Twitter for politely speculating that Veilguard would do poorly

Then Schreier writes and article saying he doesn’t like Veliguard and bounced off the game?

0f882e3f4ecd33e16ff7f14bd69069e7_w200.gif
 

Topher

Identifies as young
How the HELL does Space Marine 2 have a 78% rating? It's exquisite!

Folks complaining about performance from what I can tell. Yeah....it is a great game. I stopped playing and went back to the original so I can play them back to back.
 
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