JRPGfan said:
Mummelmann said:
Those Steam numbers look pretty woeful, been keeping an eye on it over the weekend. 89k peak concurrent players on the first weekend is quite poor - even Star Wars: Outlaws did 116k in a similar time-frame. I know that Veilguard is sold on Origin (EA App) as well, but that's a far smaller platform overall. I imagine the overall sales numbers will be far more skewed towards consoles this time around (and the entire game is more or less designed around this as well), but even then, it doesn't look like a huge hit. Inquisition has moved over 12 million units in total, this is unlikely to ever come close to that, by the looks of it. I think EA would have published some official figures already if it was an avalanche of a release; they were quick enough to brag about breaking peak concurrent player records on Steam, after all.
I have no more or less interest in the game based on sales numbers, but lower sales could entail some sort of lesson learned in the long run, if only by other developers and publishers. User scores are a shitshow, as expected, peppered with comically low and comically high scores with obvious intentions beyond the game itself. It's become a really stupid concept altogether. At the end of the day, aggregate bullshit is still bullshit.
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Dragon Age has a much stronger history on PC.
Because of that, I suspect more than half of the total sales, will be PC side.
I doubt, "overall sales numbers will be far more skewed towards consoles".
This is likely going to sell more than 3-4million copies.
Should be enough to recoup investments, and make a tiny bit of profit.
"I have no more or less interest in the game based on sales numbers, but lower sales could entail some sort of lesson learned in the long run, if only by other developers and publishers. User scores are a shitshow, as expected, peppered with comically low and comically high scores with obvious intentions beyond the game itself. It's become a really stupid concept altogether. At the end of the day, aggregate bullshit is still bullshit."
Hollywood never learns.
How often do they take a beloved IP, and then just sh*t all over the source material? Because they think they know better, than the writer of said books?
I doubt game developers will either. These people are stuck in their ways, and if DEI and LBTQA+ isn't what the public want, they wont care.
They will die on that hill, lose their jobs if that happens (a game flops), get a new one, and do-over the same thing.
Look at Disney for crying out loud. I have serious doubts any of this changes in the future.
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I know that the DA series, historically, has performed better on PC. But by the very nature of Veilguard's design, I think this might change with this installment. If it manages to sell only 3-4 million copies, that would be a disaster. Even at full price for 4 million copies, that would be unlikely to even make a profit, factoring in cuts on digital stores, distribution and PR budget. I'd be surprised if the total cost overall for this project wasn't in the vicinity of 250 million. Not to mention that it would be a mere 1/4 - 1/3 of what Inquisition managed to move across all platforms.
As I mentioned; the fact that neither EA nor Bioware have published any sort of sales figure says a lot. They focus on meaningless metrics, like concurrent players for a Bioware title, when they have virtually no history of releasing games (day one) on Steam at all. Some who defended the figures when compared to BG3 also pointed out that Veilguard stems from an old IP that lacks a presence in the modern gaming scene. Jokes on them though, seeing as BG3 is a sequel to a game from 2000, which sold about 3-3.5 million in total.
You may be correct in the part about developers not learning, there isn't all that much evidence to suggest as much. But if 2024 isn't a wake-up call for the industry, that call is never coming. The amount of flops and the staggering amounts of money lost this year alone should be a massive, blinking, neon-sign of warning to all parties involved. As an aspiring (yes, even at my age) writer myself, I don't take issue with inclusion or diversity as a concept, what I take issue with is the ham-fisted way it's done. It's clearly favored over basic cohesion, and actual quality of writing and narration. A lot of characters, incidents, and dialogue comes off as pure inserts, applied with crowbar and super-glue, lacking any kind of organic anchoring in the setting itself. It's the type of profound writing that high-school students attempt during their most confused and ill-disciplined years. Some of it is so on-the-nose that I half suspect their ancestors knocked the actual one off of the sphinx with their quills.
Last edited by Mummelmann - on 05 November 2024
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