The decade-long wait for another game in BioWare's epic fantasy series has paid off big time as the newly released Dragon Age: The Veilguard is already breaking records.
After its own rocky development journey, Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally released just yesterday to both solid reviews and a record number of players on Steam. According to SteamDB estimates, the fourth Dragon Age game pulled in more than 70,000 concurrent players who were fighting to protect the Veil all at the same time. The RPG has also topped the platform's 'Top Sellers' chart and even passed Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on the list.
Publisher EA is probably chuffed since The Veilguard is now its one of its biggest single-player launches on the platform, narrowly passing Star Wars Jedi Survivor's peak concurrent numbers, which were already impressive a year ago, but not quite reaching The Sims 4's 96,000 peak record - and who can blame 'em? It's The Sims.
Developer BioWare can still throw a party and call the game a record-breaker since it did set a new record for the studio itself. The Veilguard overtook Mass Effect: Legendary Edition's 59,000-player peak to become the company's biggest Steam release of all time.
We don't fully know how The Veilguard is stacking up alongside BioWare's biggest hits, however. EA famously stopped releasing games on Steam in 2011, and only began again in 2019, so we don't actually have a concrete idea of how big the crowds were for Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age: Inquisition on launch day. Either way, after a decade of low points from Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda to internal troubles and layoffs, it's good to see the storied studio find success doing what it does best.
I haven't personally played it yet but I'm hearing a lot of mixed reactions. Mostly about inclusion and diversity related things. Anyone play? What are your thoughts?
Its hard for me to really understand why theyre considering this game such a massive success when you compare it with other contemporary games and the peak player count of DAV is like, less than 1/10th.
Black Myth Wukong had ~2.5 million peak players.
Starfield had 330k peak players.
Monster Hunter Wilds Open Beta had ~460k peak players.
Baldurs Gate 3 had ~875k peak players.
Dragons Dogma had ~225k peak players.
All these are singleplayer games released within about a year or so of each other. So did the older Dragon Age games and Mass Effect games all sell really, really badly to have less than ~75k peak players each? I find that hard to believe. I mean, if we are going to get as granularly specific as "Best release for our specific studio on Steam, out of the like 3 games we released on Steam," then what's the point? They probably could have released a Dragon Age card game on Steam and it would probably have sold more than their previous games.
The real stat is that Veilguard is the easiest EA game to pirate currently, and there are less than 1000 seeds on the top trackers right now, which is typically abysmally bad. If people don't even want to pirate the game whsn it is easy to pirate, I feel like that's not a very good sign.
I'm not defending or praising the game here. Haven't played it yet. But I don't know what trackers you're using but that is a little bit disingenuous. It's only been available a day and the private trackers I use they have over 10,000 downloads and at least 2k seeders. That isn't bad for one day. In my opinion.