EA says Dragon Age: The Veilguard performed around half as well as expected

Facepalm: There was a lot of excitement when Dragon Age: The Veilguard was first announced, but it's fair to say that it failed to live up to the hype. EA has now revealed that the game had 1.5 million players, not unit sales, in its first two months of launch – half what the company was expecting.

In its preliminary third-quarter results for fiscal year 2025, EA writes that it is revising its anticipated mid-single-digit growth in live services net bookings to a mid-single-digit decline.

EA places most of the blame on Global Football, aka EA Sports FC, which it says that after two consecutive years of double-digit net bookings growth is slowing down. CEO Andrew Wilson singled out EA Sports 25 for underperforming.

EA also pointed to Dragon Age: The Veilguard for forcing it to revise projections. The company writes that the game "engaged" approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from EA's expectations. The RPG was the other title that Wilson said underperformed.

The use of the word "engaged" suggests that EA isn't talking about Dragon Age's unit sales. As noted by IGN, the game was available on the EA Play Pro subscription service, and the company may even be counting the free trial that was part of the cheaper EA Play service in its figures, so the actual number of units sold in the first two months (it launched after a third of Q3 had already passed) could be a lot lower than 1.5 million.

Veilguard certainly wasn't a disaster on the scale of something like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League or Sony's Concord – it was briefly Steam's best-selling game. Many companies would be more than happy to reach around 1.5 million sales in the first couple of months, but EA had big expectations for the game, and its launch week sales failed to reach the same levels as two other major RPGs: Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma II.

Veilguard was one of those games that critics appeared to enjoy more than players, based on the Metacritic scores. Beyond the gameplay itself, it was hard to ignore the controversy around what many called a political message that pushes too hard – the cutscene in which a character misgenders another and does a set of push-ups to apologize, before lecturing the others on why this is better than traditional apologies, managed to irritate almost everyone, regardless of their views. The use of the term "nonbinary" in a fantasy setting didn't go down too well, either.

There is a better, more subtle way to include a trans character in your fantasy game that does not involve a performative apology and a lecture using parlance that has no place in a game like this. This is basically self-parody. It's a shame because the game is, imo, still quite… pic.twitter.com/9XXJ2oCdGd

Developer BioWare has confirmed there won't be any DLC for Veilguard as it is now concentrating fully on the next Mass Effect game. The disappointing sales likely influenced that decision.

EA writes that it now expects net bookings of approximately $2.215 billion for the third fiscal quarter and an updated range of $7 billion to $7.15 billion for fiscal year 2025.