The highly anticipated and much-debated Dragon Age: The Veilguard has launched and the action-RPG game’s launch day performance wasn’t exactly a dragon-sized spectacle. In fact, BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s opening weekend failed to reach 100,000 concurrent players on the Steam platform.
Veilguard released on Thursday October 31st, aka Halloween, to disappointing numbers for a game that has been in development for nine years by peaking at 70,414 concurrent players on Steam (see how Veilguard fares against other competitors). The peak occurred around 6:00 pm EST during the prime hours for the East Coast in the United States with the West Coast failing to uphold those numbers or surpass them. Instead, the players declined on launch day early in the evening.
On Friday, the start of its opening weekend, player numbers didn’t fare any better as the new record was set at 77,465 at around the same time as launch day. A similar pattern was set at around 6:00 pm EST for Saturday (85,797) and Sunday which hit the highest point at 89,418. Meanwhile, Larian Studios’s RPG, Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released August 2023, easily surpassed Veilguard’s opening weekend peak by hitting 101,093 concurrent players at the same time on Sunday November 3rd.
Coincidentally, Steam refund requests spiked on Saturday, November 2nd, at 399,558 requests during Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s launch weekend. Steam’s refund policy provides a timeframe of within 14 days of purchase and/or less than two hours of playtime. While Valve doesn’t provide a breakdown of how many requests are for which games, the spike in requests coincides with Veilguard’s opening weekend leading to speculation that there are significant amount of copies being returned.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was in development for nine years and expectations were high for BioWare’s latest entry into the Dragon Age franchise. While it is possible for the game to still gain momentum after launch, it was announced that there are no plans for BioWare to develop any future DLC for Veilguard and, instead, the developer will now be focusing on the next Mass Effect game.
Given Electronic Arts’s history of failing video game franchises and studio closings, questions are being asked about BioWare’s continued existence following in the wake of disappointing results from its last two games: Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. In light of Veilguard’s opening weekend player numbers on Steam, speculation is now whether or not BioWare will be allowed to finish the next Mass Effect game if Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s sales numbers don’t hit a certain threshold and if Veilguard is a failure already?
Estimates for Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s sales numbers on Steam range anywhere from 144,000 copies to 429,000 copies according to SteamDB.
While Steam is not the only platform that Veilguard was released on, it is the only one that provides up-to-date numbers on player counts. It could be that the PC player count is an outlier while the console version for XBOX and PlayStation paint a different picture. However, there is no way to properly ascertain this. But given BioWare’s success on all platforms, Steam’s data is still a good barometer for what might be transpiring.
It is still too early to tell if Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a failure already, but its opening performance doesn’t give much confidence for its future sales.
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