Cyberpunk 2077, RDR2 still wasn’t that long ago, Dragon Age Veilguard was actually a success convincing even EA, Star Wars Jedi series, the list goes on. It just has to be a good story, you can’t just slap some boring ass story in there.
If the leaks to be trusted, they expected to sell 10 million copies but now they’re talking about they maybe can sell 3 million copies for the lifetime of the game.
Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.
Aren’t those awful numbers? Like, a big successful AAA grant does way more than 1.5mil in it’s first week. If interest was there they’d be over 3mil by now.
It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.
I’m willing to guess up to 3m has been sold across all platforms so far, but this is a major AAA game that was being developed for a full decade, there is no way in hell they didn’t spend multiple hundreds of millions on it in total. And those are very low numbers besides. Most big titles sell more than that faster than davg has.
Prototyping and design documentation was likely started a decade ago, but they wouldn’t have fully ramped up to a larger team size that’s more expensive to sustain for a full decade. In the interim, they put out Anthem, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and remastered the original Mass Effect trilogy. So there is a world where they didn’t spend $200M on it, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if they hit that number either; and if they did, they’d have to sell about 5M copies to break even (assuming a 70% cut and that not every copy sold is at $70).
It was very telling EA announced almost right after the launch that they won’t release any DLC’s and they’re moving the team to ME5 already. If that was not the sign EA left DA:V for dead, I don’t know what was.
Veilguard is far from success, and it’s because it’s the worst-written DA game to date. And that is on EA. They had every chance to make it a good game (as the art book they published shows just what a good story it was shaping up to be before EA forced them to start over for a live service version) but they chose to waste everyone’s time for 10 years by changing their mind mid development multiple times, firing the veteran team members right in the middle of development…
Odd to say Veilguard was a success when from what I can tell, one of the few things uniting the very fractured and divided gaming community this year was that the writing in Veilguard was horrible. And you know that’s true when the various members of that community can give their own varied reasons why the writing was horrible and they would all be valid.
I only see that in some communities. Most of the people that hate on veilguard, from what I’ve seen, either haven’t played the game or are clipping parts out of context.
The complaints I’ve seen that aren’t “dur hur, binary qunari” talk about the shaky dialogue in the beginning, where things felt awkward and clunky, like a new team forming. I’ll give credence to the complaints about some depth being lost in the characters versus other games in the series, but I think those people feel that way because Inquisituon was a bloated mess (that I love) and they’ve played 1 and 2 so many times in different ways they’re meshing all the dialogue into one. Playing through veilguard a second time, and watching my partner take different choices than me, made the characters on par with Mass Effect 2 allies. Which, I’d say isn’t an accomplishment so much as a mild chastisement that it hasn’t improved since then.
But, to drive home in case it isn’t clear, I love Dragon Age and I think this one ranks higher than Inquisition (but not trespasser DLC), on par with 2, and above 1 for me. I do not think it’s a Pinnacle of modern writing, it definitely suffered from some development struggles and that comes through in the final act as things get a little rushed and content feels more like a drip than a faucet. But then it wraps up well, or I thought it did.
It can use improvements, but I feel about it as i felt about 2 when it came out. “This is a change, and I’m not sure it’s what i wanted, but I do like the universe and the combat is a lot of fun and the characters as a whole are interesting”.
I enjoyed every Dragon-age game so far and Veilguard is no exception. I think the writing is fine. Not great, but good enough. I can see why some people would complain, because it’s definitely watered down compared to DA:O. But I am still having fun almost 60 hours into the game.
Someone still took the time to downvote your opinion that it ‘was fine’. The vitriol towards any positive or neutral comment is why I think it’s a specific group of people actually complaining, a fair share with “it could have been better, and it’s not my style of rpg anymore”, and the remainder just being relatively neutral to happy that they got more dragon age.
Because that’s literally what it is. Business courses are much closer to church sermons than actual classes. They don’t apply logic to things, they simply consult their already established beliefs for the path forward.
I thought the game awards were like the Oscars in that they are supposed to ignore the commercial success of the nominations? (Never follow that stuff so I could be completely wrong.)
How many video game franchises are making the leap to tv/movies these days? Hint, it’s the ones with narrative driven, story rich games.
Go ahead and make pay to win mobile games, I don’t play them and they rake in millions so it makes perfect business sense.
But the idea that gamers don’t pay for good narrative driven, story rich games is laughable.
I think the biggest problem with a lot of game franchises have is they only sell the game. So much money is being left on the table with the best efforts being a screengrab lazily printed on a cheap shirt that sells maybe one or two.
If I could get some official, quality, Umbrella/Shinra/Arasaka/Faro corporation mugs, phone covers, meme tier shirts etc I’d be all over it.
They don’t sell enough. These companies want endless growth and endless sales so they can milk the whales for endless revenue. Narrative rich, story driven games don’t sell as much as pay to win or gacha trash.
I think the title of the article is misleading a bit. According to the article, the game has been in development since 2018 and they’ve been having issues they cannot seem to be able to fix to their satisfaction and it sounds like it’s more viable for the studio to abandon the project than try to fix it by throwing more money and time at it. And it’s a console game, so that limits their market, too.To me, reading the article, “narrative driven games don’t sell anymore” is not the main problem.
What they don’t do is make money hand over fist without the need to design more product, as happens with subscription-based, game-as-a-service multiplayer titles. Some companies don’t want to make good games. They just want to make good money.
I would argue the storyline was a big part of it. While barebones by today’s standards, compared to the likes of Doom, Quake or even Unreal, it was pretty amazing to have a continuous narrative throughout the game.
It was tricky to find actual numbers so correct me if I am wrong, but if you look at the entire lifetime net profit (not revenue) of Elden Ring since it’s launch, it appears that Dragon Ball Bokken made all of Elden Ring’s profit in just 2024 alone.
When you read Bandai’s financial reports they always open with their mobile games, with From Software titles getting an “honorable mention” at the end.
A small number of mobile games sell better make obscene money, the vast majority make a pittance or lose money. But corporate types cant stop salivating at the thought of being the ones to own the next candy crush, so they’d rather take a shot at that than produce something with merit that will likely make a reasonable return.
The Journalist writes “I’m predictably both intrigued and worried that 11 bit think there’s less interest now in games with a pronounced narrative component.” But then does not detail any attempt at getting a comment from the studio on that… What gives?
Boy those are some memories! My comment was actually just a cheeky response to “you do you” - which always triggers me for some reason. I can understand the douchevotes it’s getting lol.
They’re the only games I enjoy. And I could’ve sworn I’ve seen people all over the internet lamenting the loss of story-driven single player games in this era of GTA online. These douchebags are either salivating looking at GTA online profitability and talking bullshit or they’re so goddamn deluded with their head so far up their own ass that they can’t tell their colon from their pancreas.
On the topic, anyway: my favorite games are RDR2, Cyberpunk, and Alan Wake 2. I wasn’t always a gamer, but the graphics have gotten so good and the stories so involved (in these here specifically) that I became one later in life. But now I’ve played all three of those games to death. Do you have any recs for similar games I might enjoy? I was just looking around the PS store and felt like I was swimming through nonsense. I really wanted to play Stalker 2, but it’s not out for PS5 yet. The next game I’m eyeing is a silent Hill 2 remake. Not a big fantasy person, either. I like stories with their feet in the real world. Don’t mean to single you out to give me advice, but figured I’d ask in case you had something you really liked.
It had a bit of narrative (killing the corrupted son of the traitor out of mercy and to save the world, killing the corrupted angel like beings because they are a threat to humanity), but you’re right, what really drives you is the fun gameplay loop and the challenge of escalating difficulty.
I think highlighting the success story is kind of missing both the great circumstances Larian built that game under, and the giant mountain of singleplayer games that are pretty good, but hit no success at all.
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