Dragon Age: The Veilguard

I don't think Witcher 3 is a million miles away comparison wise

It's not about comparing the games as the same but the target audience, and I bet my arse Witcher 3 and Dragon Age have the same target audience
Tried a few times to complete Witcher 3, couldn't do it, keep getting bored. Loved 1 and 2 though.
 
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.
 
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.

Don't forget the x% of the 10+ million EA subs per month until the game is removed from the catalogue.
 
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?

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”.
 
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Don't forget the x% of the 10+ million EA subs per month until the game is removed from the catalogue.

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?
 
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.
 
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?

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.
 
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.
 
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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.

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.
 
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