EA CEO on why DA: The Vailguard failed....

I really liked David Gaider's take on this. Gaider, the lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games, posted on Bluesky about Wilson's comments. 

If I really dig into my empathy, I can kinda see the thinking here. Like, let's say you don't actually know much about games. You're in a big office with a bunch of other execs who also don't know much about games. What are they all saying? "Live games do big numbers!" "Action games are hot!"

Your natural response? "We should make more action games, and all our games should have live service!" Cha-ching, right? Then some uppity devs spoil your buzz by saying "that doesn't apply equally to all games" or "we have an established IP with an audience that has certain expectations". You frown.

I think there's a lesson here for Sony as well, whose goal was to release 12 live service games in a short span, but then Concord was possibly the biggest video game flop of all-time, and they canceled a whole bunch of them. The problem with live service games is that the people playing them need to be convinced to move over. If you have a million people playing Destiny and you create a game that's kinda like Destiny, you're not conjuring an entirely new set of a million players.

I'm not going to claim to know more about the gaming industry than the people running it, but as a Dragon Age fan, I just want a Dragon Age game that's like the original one. Every Dragon Age sequel has felt very different, which worked in the favor of Inquisition as it's the most successful one, but there's only so many times you can reinvent the wheel before the thing just doesn't spin anymore.

And I'm saying this as someone who really liked The Veilguard, but I definitely see why it didn't attract a larger audience. It was too different and it should have released five years earlier. "Shared world features" wouldn't have made a difference.