Dragon Age: The Veilguard peaked at 89,418 Steam concurrent users during its opening weekend, a decent return but way off some of the biggest RPGs of the year. To this end, it is very obvious that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is going to come absolutely nowhere near the 12 million units sold of Dragon Age: Inquisition.
How many units it has to sell to make its money back is currently unknown outside the walls of EA and BioWare. Considering the ambition of the game, the overhead of the studio that made it, and how many years it was in development, it is safe to assume it has to sell at least a few million copies before it starts making any money, but this is just speculation. Only time will tell if it achieves commercial success for BioWare, who is in desperate need of a win following Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda.
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When you take into consideration some of the numbers RPGs have posted this year on Steam, less than 90k isn’t exactly the most exciting figure. Dragon’s Dogma 2 released earlier this year and peaked at 228,585 concurrent Steam users. That demolishes Dragon Age: The Veilguard. And it achieved this with a less popular IP. The first Dragon’s Dogma sold eight million units, four million less than Dragon Age: Inquisition. Yet, with this smaller install base it crushed on Steam at launch, something Dragon Age: The Veilguard has failed to replicate.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 only sold 2.5 million units in its release window. If the difference between the two on console is similar to the difference between the two on Steam, than Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t even hit one million units sold in its release window.
Perhaps a more damning comparison are indie RPGs, Hades 2, Enshrouded, and The Last Epoch, all of which released this year and did substantially better on Steam than their AAA RPG counterpart. More than this, two of these games aren’t even out yet, but are early access releases.
Steam Peak of 2024’s Biggest RPGs
- Black Myth: Wukong – 2,415,714
- Last Epoch – 264,708
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 – 228,585
- Enshrouded – 160,405
- Hades 2 – 103,567
Obviously, Dragon Age: The Veilguard came nowhere near Black Myth: Wukong, but that is an unfair comparison considering it is one of the biggest releases of the generation, something a new Dragon Age game was never going to be.
It is early days, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t off to the best start. However, it isn’t off to a bad start either. The question is how many copies is EA expecting to sell? Until we know this, we won’t know if it has been a success or not. What is clear though is the game is not a commercial flop, which some suggested it would before it released this week.
