As you’d expect, there are plenty of folks out there who don’t quite agree with the thing EA executives seemed to imply during the company’s latest earnings call: that Dragon Age: The Veilguard might have sold better if it had kept the live-service elements that were once it in it.
This came after the game jopined EA Sports FC 25 on the naughty step of not managing to hit the targets EA set for it, an outcome which has been followed by changes and cuts at BioWare.
Anyway, long-time Dragon Age stalwart and the creator of a lot of Thedas’ lore David Gaider has offered his view on the kind of lessons that EA appears to be taking from Veilguard’s fate in a thread on Bluesky. While admitting that he can see how an exec might come to see live-services as an obvious money hare to chase, he unsurprisingly doesn’t think that’s the way DA should go.
“There are certainly all sorts of lessons a company could learn from a game like Veilguard (I still haven’t played it, so I’m going off what other people have said),” Gaider wrote, “but ‘maybe it should have been live service’ being the takeaway seems a bit short-sighted and self-serving.
“My advice to EA (not that they care): you have an IP that a lot of people love. Deeply. At its height, it sold well enough to make you happy, right? Look at what it did best at the point where it sold the most. Follow Larian’s lead and double down on that. The audience is still there. And waiting.”
Not that there's any shortage of that, when it comes to deciding why a game doesn't do well. For the anti-woke crowd, for instance, there are woke games that do well and woke games that do poorly and only the ones that did poorly did so *because* they were woke. Says more about them than the game.
— David Gaider (@davidgaider.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T23:58:47.792Z
So, look to Baldur’s Gate 3 as an example of how single-player games – if they have a strong vision and are given the kind of development cycle that allows for said vision to be executed and developed to its fullest – can still be as big a hit today as any pretty much any of the top sharks that survive in the blood-soaked waters of the currently pretty packed live-service sea.
Gaider also adressed the very loud elephant in the room that Veilguard has had to deal with – that being idiots moaning about the nothing phrase that is “wokeness” in a way that definitely isn’t actual useful criticism of a game’s flaws.
“For the anti-woke crowd, for instance, there are woke games that do well and woke games that do poorly and only the ones that did poorly did so *because* they were woke,” the developer wrote, “Says more about them than the game.”
We’ll just have to see what the future holds for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, with the latter now being the big focus of the cut-down BioWare that remains.
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