This week, EA CEO Andrew Wilson suggested that Dragon Age: The Veilguard may have underperformed because it wasn’t a live service game.
“In order to break beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” Wilson said. “Dragon Age had a high quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played; however, it did not resonate with a broad-enough audience in this highly competitive market.”
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EA And Sony Show Two Very Different Responses To Failure
In the same call, Wilson noted that 74 percent of EA’s business currently stems from live service games. It’s easy to see how you could come to the conclusion that if live service games like Apex Legends and EA Sports FC are bringing in huge amounts of money, Dragon Age needs to be more like those games.
But at the same time that EA is speculating that its single-player game failed because it needed multiplayer, Sony is shutting down multiplayer iterations of its single-player IP. After the failure of Concord, PlayStation has gone back to the drawing board, cancelling live service games based on Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, and God of War, plus a new live service game from Days Gone creator Bend Studios. All of this followed Naughty Dog’s December 2023 announcement that it was cancelling its long-gestating The Last of Us multiplayer game.
A few years ago, Sony announced that it had 12 live-service games in the works. Though one of them, Helldivers 2, turned out to be a big success, Concord was one of the biggest flops in the history of video games. Those two games’ very different fates highlight that a one size fits all approach doesn’t work in game design.
EA is correctly seeing that games-as-a-service make it a ton of money, and it understandably wants more games that make a ton of money. But the leap from that desire to the belief that Dragon Age would succeed as a live service game is where the logic falls apart. Games aren’t just numbers in a spreadsheet. You can’t just take the thing that works for Apex, tack it onto a BioWare game, and expect critics and fans to like it.
Dragon Age Can’t Be Apex Legends
You know how I know that? Because I remember Anthem. The studio that gave us single-player gems like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect 2 attempted to shove the live service square peg into the round hole of a narrative-driven RPG and failed. I like that game more than most people, but it’s undeniable that it was a critical and commercial failure. It’s the reason Veilguard — which started life as a live service game — is single-player in the first place.
Sony, meanwhile, is taking a different approach to failure. Concord did much worse than Dragon Age, and Sony learned from the experience and changed course. EA may have rose-tinted glasses because it has multiple hit live-service games, but the market is well and truly flooded. Games still break through on occasion, but most players have found their live service game and are sticking with it. What worked in 2019 doesn’t work in 2025.
Wilson’s comments seem like buyer’s remorse. BioWare was right to rework The Veilguard to be a single-player game, and EA was right to allow it. BioWare just didn’t make a very good single-player game. That happens. As I write this, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 just debuted to nearly 160,000 concurrents. That game isn’t doing huge numbers because it has “shared-world features,” it’s doing huge numbers because it’s a good, self-contained RPG.
I would love to see BioWare get the comeback fans have been waiting a decade for, but that won’t happen if EA tries to turn BioWare into Respawn. Sony saw the error in trying to turn its single-player franchises into live service games before it was too late. I hope EA can do the same.
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EA Has Completely Misunderstood What Made Dragon Age: The Veilguard Underperform
It wasn’t that it was single-player, I promise.