In an unusual move, Electronic Arts has suddenly disclosed the launch figures for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Let’s put them in context and compare to previous games in the series.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has reached around 1.5 million players in the first two months since its launch on October 31, 2024. Electronic Arts said it was down nearly 50% below expectations.
What’s worse, the 1.5 million figure includes not only copies purchased by consumers, but also users who tried out the action RPG through the EA Play Pro subscription. So its full-game sales are even lower.
As a result, The Veilguard’s launch feels lackluster compared to previous Dragon Age titles:
- Dragon Age: Origins — 3.2 million copies sold in three months (from its launch on November 3, 2009 to February 8, 2010);
- Dragon Age II — 1 million copies sold in its first two weeks, over 2 million copies in two months (from its launch on March 8, 2011 to May 4, 2011);
- Dragon Age: Inquisition — there is no clear data on the game’s launch sales, with EA only saying that Inquisition “quickly became the most successful launch in BioWare history” based on units sold (from its release on November 18, 2014 to December 31, 2015), so it is safe to assume that it was selling faster than previous DA games.
Last year, former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah said Dragon Age: Inquisition had sold over 12 million copies globally, adding that it “massively oversold the internal EA projections.” In 2018, he also called Inquisition the best-selling game in BioWare’s portfolio.
For comparison, the entire Mass Effect trilogy has sold over 14 million units as of July 2014. Electronic Arts rarely discloses lifetime sales figures, so there is no official data on later BioWare releases like Mass Effect: Andromeda or Mass Effect: Legendary Edition at all. The company only said it was satisfied with their commercial performance.
Now back to the sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard — it is no surprise that they fell short of EA’s expectations. The game’s production and marketing budget remains undisclosed, but it is clear that reaching just 1.5 million players (not all of them are full-game sales) in two months is unlikely to be enough for a Western AAA action RPG to become a commercially successful project even in the long term.