Tried a few times to complete Witcher 3, couldn't do it, keep getting bored. Loved 1 and 2 though.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
- Thread starter JJimmyJ
- Start date
Soldato
There's little chance this game is financially successful, if it took 10 years to make, went through multiple remakes and only has 80,000 concurrent players on steam its easy to "guess" at how many copies they potentially sold.
Lets look at the numbers.
10 years to make
200 employees
80,000 concurrent players on steam
If the average play time is 4 hours that's a potential 600,000 sales which based on the price tag of 59.99 is only 35 million. To employ 200 staff for 10 years on minimum wage would cost them 50 million over 10 years.
If the game cost them $100 million to make they'd need to sell 1.6 million copies.
The game is a sold 6/10, better than Star Wars Outlaws by a country mile and slightly better than Starfield, but its no where near other recent games in the same genre.
Lets look at the numbers.
10 years to make
200 employees
80,000 concurrent players on steam
If the average play time is 4 hours that's a potential 600,000 sales which based on the price tag of 59.99 is only 35 million. To employ 200 staff for 10 years on minimum wage would cost them 50 million over 10 years.
If the game cost them $100 million to make they'd need to sell 1.6 million copies.
The game is a sold 6/10, better than Star Wars Outlaws by a country mile and slightly better than Starfield, but its no where near other recent games in the same genre.
Don't forget the x% of the 10+ million EA subs per month until the game is removed from the catalogue.
Or the console sales.
Which at this rate will be next Tuesday, but yeah fair point.
Either or, It's unlikely to be a run away success, but may keep the studio going?
This made me chuckle
My 13 year old nephew likes that channel, just saying.
Soldato
Will that be enough to break 100 million? I'd probably even go as far to say it may have cost them $300 million or more to make. Which would require ~5 million copies sold across all platforms.
Or just convince devs that it’s OK to keep releasing mediocre games. It’s not a conspiracy, I believe in **** up before conspiracy and they just weren’t good enough. It’s what happens when stuff is designed by committee using some mathematical equations of “what people like”.
Last edited:
Soldato
How does that work - like a game claims "sold 2m copies" but does that exclude the amount of people who play it just by buying a sub via EA, or XBox game pass? Or does it count as a "sale" if someone downloads it while paying a sub?
Soldato
You have to keep in mind also steam and the retail shops will take a percentage of sales made.
Or refund it
Soldato
Simply put there's no way its a financial success for them, factoring the margins from the likes of steam and other platforms, revenue shares from xbox live/ea play etc, marketing, development costs etc I would not be shocked to find they need $300-400 million just to break even, with the failure of Anthem as well after EA spent $800 million buying Bioware, I think they might be on their last watch.
I can imagine one of two things will have happened:
1.EA have an agreement to pay BioWare X Million up front for the game to be on EA play
2.EA pay BioWare a % of the revenue of the EA sub as long as they have games in the catalogue. This would then act as a recurring revenue stream for BioWare
3. A Mix of the above - i.e a smaller payment upfront, combined with a smaller %
The issue we have when discussing the games "success" based on sales is that we will never know without some kind of NDA breach, because we have no idea how things are structured in the publishing agreement. It muddies everything as without knowing for sure - we can only trust what the companies declare in their annual earnings.
My points on this have been generalised to a degree and again, not a point for this game alone - but all games found within these subscription models.
In answer to your specific question, I'm assuming (so it's probably wrong) that 2M units sold would be exactly that - 2M game units (but I'm not sure if that means one platform or all). Sub based sales are probably not factored in as you can't say for certain that the sub was for a specific game or not, which I why I surmise the above payment scenarios. I doubt downloads would count - as that could be manipulated in bad faith to drive higher sales, which I doubt EA would play ball with.
Lots of 13 year olds love Dragon Age Veilguard too, also saying
How would you know that
Weirdly the media seem to be pretty quick to call it a success...
But with the figures so far it doesn't take very advanced maths to see it looks like a flop financially.
Word of mouth sells things more than anything. But the word isn't good, despite their effort to control the media.
But with the figures so far it doesn't take very advanced maths to see it looks like a flop financially.
Word of mouth sells things more than anything. But the word isn't good, despite their effort to control the media.
Last edited:
Soldato
Not hard to figure out why. They did it for Star Wars Outlaw and Starfield.
Those that were critical of other game releases didn't get review copies, and now they have the game the truth is being revealed.
Which is not entirely honest, but also the media doesn't pay the studios wage bill and keep the staff in employment.