Dragon Age: The Veilguard Has a Weaker Than Expected Opening Weekend

Video Games

Alex Gherzo | Nov 5, 2024 |

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the horrendous-looking new entry in the RPG video game series from BioWare, was released this past Thursday (Halloween, which is kind of hilarious), so it’s had a weekend to make its mark and give interested parties an indication of how successful it will be. And while it’s not the disaster many thought it might be, at least on Steam, it’s not great, either. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is part of a successful video game franchise, so in a vacuum, it would be expected to do very well, with Andrew Wilson, the CEO of BioWare’s parent company, Electronic Arts, saying it had “breakout potential” the day before it went live, citing the strong performance of its immediate predecessor, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and its “incredibly high quality, creative storytelling set in an amazing world with rich characters.”

Dragon Age Veilguard is the newest megabudget video game. It tasks you with saving the world, but there are multiple scenes where you must contend with being non-binary or trans because the lead designer is trans. Wokeness ruins everything it touches. pic.twitter.com/IyrvtVJxzW
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 2, 2024

Those “rich characters” include a sort of blue ram monster (forgive me, I’m not well-versed in Dragon Age lore, so I don’t know the species) identifying as non-binary and announcing its pronouns, and a woman who punishes herself with push-ups for misgendering said non-binary ram monster. The “creative storytelling” involves laborious scenes where the ram monster explains its gender situation and a moment where the ram monster forces itself on the evil misgendering woman (presumably after all those push-ups). The “amazing world” is made up of characters who conform to modern niche gender ideas, the ability to choose to give your character scars from gender-reassignment surgery, and pop-up suggestions to talk to other characters about “the benefits of a multi-cultural background.” This isn’t a story, and it barely looks like a game; it’s a gender-identity indoctrination course that you have to pay $70 to attend.

Holy shit this is real? LOL
I need to meet the people who enjoy #DragonAgeVeilguard unironically. This is hilarious in the worst way possible, but just imagine being the person who says with a straight face this is game of the year. pic.twitter.com/Qxj5Fx9HB5
— Melee Games (@MeleeGames) November 4, 2024

So, how’s it doing? Not terribly, but it’s not the breakout Electronic Arts was selling it as. On Steam, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an all-time concurrent players peak of 89,418, which it achieved yesterday, the Sunday of its release weekend. That’s not nearly as low as some of the massive bombs we’ve seen this year, like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (13,459), Concord (697), Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (648), Tales of Kenzera: Zau (287), or Dustborn (83… wow). Next to those walking corpses, it looks downright successful. But look at it compared to this year’s breakout hit, Black Myth: Wukong, which has an all-time peak of 2,415,714 concurrent players. Black Myth: Wukong even has a bigger 24-hour peak than Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with 99,761 concurrent players to Dragon Age’s 65,683, and that’s a three-month-old game, compared to one that just came out. Black Myth: Wukong also doesn’t have a brand name boosting it like Dragon Age: The Veilguard does, something that likely propelled it beyond those other disasters (aside from Suicide Squad). That Park Place also compares it to some other “breakout” games from recent years; Elden Ring from 2022 has an all-time peak of 953,426 concurrent players, while Baldur’s Gate 3 from 2023 had an 875,343 all-time peak. Baldur’s Gate 3 also had a bigger 24-hour peak than Dragon Age: The Veilguard with 74,569 concurrent players today. When the Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, was released in June 2024, the game rose to 781,261 peak concurrent players for the year.

Dragon Age VEILGUARD couldn’t break 100K players on Steam in its debut weekend, now it’s done to almost 30K already.
What I was told prior to release was that this game had less than 500K pre orders, I didn’t believe it at first which is why I never reported on it cause there’s… pic.twitter.com/qyCtzmegJj
— Endymion (@EndymionYT) November 4, 2024

What this means for Dragon Age: The Veilguard is that it’s likely going to underperform, as Mark Kern talks about on his X page. It isn’t a disaster, but it can’t be what BioWare was expecting, and based on Andrew Wilson’s comments, it certainly wasn’t what Electronic Arts had envisioned. This is conjecture, of course, but I think it’s fair to assume that the awful woke content that spilled out before its release had a hand in Dragon Age’s low player count on Steam; this followed a year of indications that the game would go in this direction. And I think that’s fair because the opposite could be said of Black Myth: Wukong, which got a reputation for refuting that, as did Stellar Blade (which never had a PC release, so it’s not on Steam). We don’t know what Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s physical sales are like, but according to inside information from Side Scrollers host Stuttering Craig and Endymion, the forecast is not good. The Dragon Age brand name probably kept it from being a total disaster, but people are learning which games to avoid.