Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched only a few hours ago, but in this short timeframe, the game has already managed to break some Steam records. Firstly, it has reached a concurrent player peak record for a BioWare game with 70.K players. The previous best was Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which launched in May 2021 and included the full remastered trilogy of the sci-fi franchise; its Steam peak was 59.8K concurrent players.
However, it should be noted that for several years, EA did not release its games on Steam to favor its own store and app (first Origin, then EA app). For example, Anthem was never launched on Steam, as EA only reverted this policy several months after the third-person cooperative shooter launched. By that time, the game had already failed.
While Anthem quickly faded, it did attract considerable interest at first due to the hype. For example, it topped PS4’s digital chart for that month. It is reasonable to assume it could have achieved bigger numbers on Steam had it been released right away on Valve’s platform.
Still, even with those caveats, Dragon Age: The Veilguard also became the single player game with the highest concurrent player peak published by Electronic Arts, beating Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which stopped at 67.8K players. There’s another little caveat here: The Sims 4 is also a single player title, and it peaked at 96.3K players on Steam, but it is a free-to-play game.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard could still surpass The Sims 4 wholesale during the weekend, when concurrent player records are usually established. Anyway, user reception also appears to be largely favorable, with 79% of the 3,610 user reviews already submitted rating it positively.
Granted, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see a larger picture of the game’s sales. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson recently expressed confidence in the game’s breakout potential.
In my review of the game, I wrote:
With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has largely returned to its roots, casting aside the temptations of open world and/or live service games. Instead, Veilguard is a great mission-based RPG with a memorable story that will leave Dragon Age fans enthralled by the revelations, an awesome combat system that perfectly blends action and tactics, and lots of loot and secrets to uncover through its 80-hour playthrough.
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