Xbox veteran and former Gears of War executive producer Laura Fryer shared her thoughts on the fate of BioWare after the release of the controversial Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In her opinion, the studio may face layoffs due to low sales.
The new Dragon Age initially showed itself well on Steam, demonstrating an online peak of 89,000 players, but the excitement around the game is gradually dying down. At the time of writing, the average daily number of gamers no longer exceeds 30,000 and is constantly decreasing.
With sales, everything is also unclear — according to analysts from Circana, the circulation of The Veilguard is unlikely to reach the level of Inquisition (12 million copies), although there is a chance. According to unconfirmed information, it was only 650 thousand.
Against this background, Xbox co-founder Laura Fryer spoke out. In her recent video, she talked about the current situation in the industry, when studios create an «information bubble» in the media for the sake of marketing, completely losing touch with the audience. The Xbox veteran also went over Dragon Age: The Veilguard. According to her, the game had a huge budget for production alone, so to make a profit, it needs to sell several million copies. The latter, she believes, is unlikely.
It looks like this will not be enough, and I fear that this will lead to more layoffs.
Layoffs are nothing new for BioWare — last year, the staff was reduced by 50 people for «greater flexibility and speed of development.» However, so far there is no talk of them, and the studio cheerfully reports on work on Mass Effect 5. Nevertheless, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was left without add-ons, which is unusual for the series.
We recently released our review of the new part of Dragon Age. The short verdict is beautiful, but mediocre. Concept art for the game also surfaced recently, showing a much darker and more mature plot.