The original Mass Effect sold 2 million copies.
Mass Effect 2 sold 5 million copies.
Mass Effect 3 sold 7 million copies.
Mass Effect Andromeda sold 5 million copies.
While Mass Effect might not match the astronomic sales of game franchises such as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, or Need for Speed, its sales figures nonetheless affirm its colossal presence within the military sci-fi genre. Mass Effect 3 stands out as the most popular title in the series in terms of sales, yet when examining the Mass Effect Andromeda sales, alongside other sequels, they all seem to echo a similar success rate, showcasing a relatively consistent hype and reception across the franchise, with the exception of the original game.

Mass Effect 3 sales made $200 million in revenue.
(Sources: MoneyInc, Destructoid, Eurogamer, PC Gamer, TechTimes)

Mass Effect 3 sold twice the number of copies as Mass Effect 2 did in its first month.
Mass Effect Andromeda was a financial success, stated as being a driving factor in BioWare’s revenue.
Mass Effect legendary Edition was also a success and sold better than EA had expected.
The $92.3 million that the Mass Effect franchise is worth is regarding total sales of games as well as other media and merchandise, but even without that, the series has still raked in a tremendous amount of profit.

On September 17, Darrah shared the data in a comment on X, saying that Dragon Age: Inquisition has sold over 12 million units globally since its launch in November 2014.

He noted that the game “massively oversold the internal EA projections,” adding that he doesn’t understand where the prejudice that it was a commercial failure came from.

In 2018, Darrah called Dragon Age Inquisition the best-selling game in BioWare’s portfolio. And it appears that it holds that title to this day.

Yeah I’m not sure where “DAI was a commercial failure” came from…
Its over 12 million at this point.
MASIVELY oversold the internal EA projections
…
Oh yeah and was GotY in 2014.

— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) September 17, 2024

I think it's a shame, because all in all Dragon Age Veilguard is not really a bad game.

I sure was no top game, but certainly not as bad as those video's on Youtube and that rage on the Steam Forums let you believe. I personally have a good time with the game. Yep - There is some cringe stuff here and there, but far from as much as people said. To be honest - I think it's a bit better game than Inquisition, but that's a personal taste.

Will Bioware be over? Hmm... I think it all depends on how the new Mass Effect will turned out to be. If that is a success then Bioware probably will survive. If not - Well... It's EA that have their finger on the kill switch, so yeah...

I think Dragon Age Veilguard has suffered from the pressure of EA to make it a live service game half way development. All early development stuff had to be scrapped and rebuild again for that live service. And a few years later it all was scrapped and it suddenly must be a single player game again. All on-line stuff was useless, and the whole game had to be redesigned again by scrapping all on line stuff. Of course that included all art design too. Then they only got a short time to finish the game and get it out of the door. They had to cut corners, and well.. It's is a miracle we even got a game...

Don't get me wrong - I don't defend anything, but at least I can see the reason why the game turned out to be the way it is now. Still - The game, despite it's flaws, is a fun game to play. As I said above, I have a nice time with it...

The main underlying issue of why the big budget games keep failing is exactly that - the big budget and management. It is just not reasonable for games to require hundreds of millions of dollars to make. Look no further than Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which easily shows what you can do with a sub 100 million dollar budget (40 million total budget from what I could find). They recouped their development costs within 24 hours of release.

Triple A companies are used to throwing more money/people at problems instead improving efficiency and reducing bloat, which gets quite expensive quite quickly. They can't afford average at best, 5/10 like Veilguard or Star Wars: Outlaws. Anything below an 8-9/10 game is basically primed to fail and they are finding out the hard way. Whether they can course correct in time or not remains to be seen, but big corpos are notoriously slow to change their ways and they are almost out of time (in case of Ubisoft and Bioware).

They still seem to be operating under the assumption, that the triple A label will always guarantee them success, the same way it did 10-15 years ago. But with how saturated the gaming market has become over the years, they too now have to fight for their piece of the pie with the others and start creating good, generally liked games. Which Veilguard definitely is not.

Combine that with the recent trend of actively telling off your audience for pointing out why they don't like what you're offering and the reason for the current state of the industry is actually pretty clear.

Numbers are very clear at this point. The game "reached" 1.5 million players (key word, does not mean sales, expect like at least 33% less actual sales) vs 3 million sales target (also highly doubtful after Inquisition's 10+ million). You can bundle pretty much anything under "reached", including those who got the game for free or through a subscription service. It was a very deliberately chosen word.

Just do a quick search. The game was a failure, proven by the now officially reported numbers.

I'd say yes, at least in part. Drastically changing the genre of a long standing series from a party management (A)RPG to what is basically just a 3rd person action game absolutely did put off some of the core audience.

They should definitely up it to main character + 3 companions. Always felt that just 2 in Mass Effect was very limited compared to 3 in Dragon Age Origins and Inquisition.

Fans of Bioware always struck me as indecisive and cruel to Bioware's artistic decisions. I wouldn't take layoffs personally. I didn't know this mattered.

Yes, in spite of the generous reviews 79% pc gamer, 71% opencritic financially the game can be classified as a failure. For myself I was more looking for journalism stories that could complement the numbers.

Did EA really feel that the whole companies future lies in live service entertainment? Or Why did they want to turn an established developer with heart and style into a Tokyo bunny? That was what i was looking for. You almost want to be at shareholder meetings etc....

Yeah, this seems to be an evolution of the previous attitude that some of the big game companies had been taking for years. Generally, it seems to have been "The players will like what we tell them they should like. If we decide to put something in a game, even over their protests, then obviously we know better than them." I've complained about that history before with regards to EA, but it's not limited to just them, and not to just the gaming industry either. For as much as some people fanboy over Apple, how many times have they added or removed something from their products that immediately pissed off... well, just about everyone? Most of the gigantic corporations are guilty of this to one degree or another these days.

Innovating is fine, but stop ignoring what your customers are asking you for, and stop forcing things on us that no one wants.

The entire gaming industry seems to be lurching in that direction. The CEOs don't want to make single-player or offline games because there's limited potential for further fleecing your customers. Except... when they make a truly excellent or innovative game, there's a market for expansions and/or DLC. The original Sims certainly wasn't the first to that party, but they were the first to make historically ridiculous amounts of money off of expansions to the base game, which is why every subsequent release has followed a similar line, and why EA keeps trying to recreate that success with its other franchises, and ruining many of them in the process.

To really stretch a metaphor here, CEOs are never happy having just one goose that lays golden eggs. In their pursuit of having a whole flock of them, they accidentally butcher them all and then look at us like it's our fault somehow. CEOs are often naturally shortsighted like that, when you'd think they'd be better at thinking long-term.

I don't mind people trying to help make the world a better place. But this was beyond "better place" and more "you will do this in our game regardless of player agency".

An eggdicator can tell the difference between a good egg and a bad egg, and uneducated eggdictator, well, he simply makes an omelette fit for a king.

Well, the disconnect between "gaming journalists" access media and reality is hardly anything new. And why hardly anybody these days really cares about what scores they give games and wait until normal people get their hands on the game and watch/consider reviews mostly from them.

Access media lives off of... well, access. Which they might lose if they review honestly or critically. They need those early review copies to draw traffic or they will inevitably fall behind. So they will do nothing that might bring the risk of losing the access (like giving a 5-6/10 to a game) and always try to stay on the good side of the dev/publisher in question. Which is where the meme that IGN will give at least a 7/10 to anything, no matter how bad, came from.

another topic all together but to be honest, i also reached a point where i differ between bad and 'just not for me'

in that respect, gaming journalism is kind of an oddity if you look at it. At least i'm having difficulty to imagine myself 'growing' and sustaining myself in such an environment. But i'm also someone who has a strong physical aspect in his character so maybe that is also a thing.

Back to dragon age Veilguard, you say its bad but if you take on a journalism hat and acknowledge several aspects such as

presentation
story
mechanics

I think it is hard to give veil guard a negative score

User reviews on the other hand seem to be on their height .. what was that word again that describes people who spilt in the society in half for their own gains... i'm not sure any more but gamer life seems to be dictated by the biggest balls of some juniors who only interest is to score often and cheap

Fomo ..... and our youngsters .....
Yea, i immediately have that weird reaction from that EA executive who in my mind muttered about how he knew it was a good idea

And yes, we see a trend though, with all the big failures i won't be surprised if there are also lessons learned...

especially when we as a crowd will name this "Tokoyo Bunny" behaviour or at least i hope so....

there should be another list going around the internet that describes that as we as gamers, while we do enjoy a good fuck, we rather keep that exchange sound and natural......

It's not an unplayable broken mess, yes. But it mostly depends on what you take as a negative score. If I were to rate it just as a game and not a part of an existing series, I'd give probably like a 5-5.5/10. Otherwise, it'd be like a 3/10 at best. There will of course be people who will just instantly go to 0 or 1 because of mostly political reasons, but even looking at it objectively as a game, I'd be having a hard time pushing myself to give it a 6 or above. It's not spectacular or notable in absolutely any regard. Many would take that as a negative rating, but for me, it's a mostly average game when viewed on its own.

The problem is, AAA studios can't afford average. When your game fails to sell even with the normie audience, which is like the 95+% of people who have absolutely no clue about the whole culture war shebang and whatnot, you have to face the reality that the game might just be lacking in enough areas to fail in garnering enough interest. Just look at the Steam page. You can slap as many 5/5 or 9/10 ratings from journalist outlets in the store description as you want, but the recent user reviews sitting at 62% tell a different story. Also mostly checks out with my rating of "slightly above average at best" rating of 5.5/10.

Yellow text on Steam for a new AAA game = instant failure.