Normally these articles are slightly alarmist making it sound like a company will fall over becuase of one bad game release and when you look at the share price over time it is still up. but this one is interesting. EA are down 15% over the past 12 months because of this one drop.
Yeah most game news websites don't understand stocks but in this case, DA Vanguard was a massive failure. In the press release, the game was played by 1.5 million people. Not copies sold, just played. This probably includes people that just bought a month of EA Play to check it out.
The newest fifa game (EA sports FC now) also under-performed but they didn't say much about it beyond that. A few more flops and it sounds like EA could be following Ubisoft into crashing hard.
Another way to see that 15% drop is hinted at in the article:
EA FC generates around $2 billion annually, Reuters reports, with around $800 million of that made up by Ultimate Team.
Loot boxes made EA $800M last year. It's easy to see why EA and other publishers demand MTX in games. Can we amend "Don't preorder" with "and ignore micro transactions"?
@[email protected] Pretty sure that ignoring micro-transactions has always been "a thing" to take a stand against. But of course, when it comes to the general public, no one ever does.
If they just released what people were expecting (and wanting): Dreadwolf, a true Dragon Age sequel - then it would've sold by the figurative truckload and they'd be riding the money boat right now.
But no. The reality-disconnected decision makers decreed that it had to be ultra sanitised, corporate, Disney-esque slop. Not an awful game, sure, but absolutely not a Dragon Age game.
I have been talking a lot with a friend of mine about DAV and Dreadwolf.
I really think that even if they released the Dreadwolf, the version from the artbook, they probably won't made a profit, the game could sell well like Inquisition but not like a Cyberpunk/The Witcher 3/BG3 and for the amount of time and resource they used sales like inquisition is not enough. They blew their chances with the 10 years of delays, the IP was not in a good place.
Only a miracle, a game on the same level as BG3 for Bioware to make a profit again.
You should play the original if you can, it really is the best Dragon Age game. Steam has a guide to get it up and running on modern machines.
Also, were you able to follow the story of Veilguard? I haven't played it yet (and honestly I might never) but I got the impression that it was pretty tied to the story of Inquisition.
Baldurs gate 3 ruined it for the large AAA developers/publishers. People are now excepting good games like that.
Look. I don't care about the political content in a game as long as the game is good!
The issue is, these large game companies have been trying to change the mindset of gamers to accept games with less content because at the end of the day the only thing these companies want is to sell horse armour.