EA Confirms What Everyone Knew – Dragon Age: The Veilguard Was A Flop, But Doesn’t Disclose Sales Numbers

Electronic Arts has released some preliminary results for its third fiscal quarter, announcing that it has revised its outlook for FY25 which ends March 31, 2025 from growth to decline. In the press release, EA revealed that there were two major reasons for the decrease with Global Football accounting for the majority of this downturn. However, BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard was also mentioned as another factor having come in at 50% below the company’s expectations.

According to EA, Dragon Age: The Veilguard “engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50%” from their expectations which would be around 3 million players. What is odd about this information is that this isn’t the number of sales figures, but players engaged. 

While the 1.5 million figure lines up with content creator SmashJT’s anonymous sources who leaked that Veilguard sold under 1.5 million copies, the phrasing from EA is still odd. In addition, those same sources also said that EA had expected to sell 3 million copies within the first three months. There is also a rumor that EA had an expectation of around 10 million copies sold long term. 

Why EA focused on player numbers and not copies sold could imply that Dragon Age: The Veilguard sales numbers are much lower than expected. Especially in light of review copies given out, bundles where Veilguard copies were given for free when purchasing select NVIDIA GPUs, and even the high amount of returns that was seen when the game launched on Steam though no specific number of the 399,558 refund requests can be ascertained from the overall figure. 

Since its release on October 31st, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has seen a steep decline in player numbers on Steam from a peak of 89,418 down to around 4,139 concurrent players at the time of this article’s posting. If that wasn’t enough, the Steam Achievement data for BioWare’s action RPG saw a slight decline of gamers playing Chapter 1 during the first month at 89.5% to 89.2% three months later. However, the percentage of players who reached the final chapter did increase from 25.3% up to 32.5%, though that is still a small number for those who have reached the game’s end moth’s after release. 

BioWare also saw the departure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard game director Corinne Busche left the company in the wake of the game’s abysmal performance. Busche’s departure was confirmed shortly after content creator SmashJT was provided an internal email about their departure. 

There is also a rumor that EA plans to shut down the Edmonton studio. Meanwhile, BioWare has now shifted its focus to the next Mass Effect game and have no plans to release any DLC for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

The full release for EA’s financial results will be available February 4th.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this article, BioWare released a statement on its future talking about how employees have been shifted to other EA teams, BioWare being focused on the new Mass Effect game, and that they don’t need the full studio for in light of the new direction that they developer is taking.

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