Veilguard’s opening weekend is missing some of the biggest RPGs of 2024

Dragon Age: The Veilguard peaked at 89,418 concurrent Steam users on its opening weekend, which is a decent number but a far cry from some of the biggest RPGs of the year. In this regard, it is quite clear that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will not come close to the 12 million copies sold of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

How many units it will have to sell to make its money back is currently unknown outside the walls of EA and BioWare. Considering the game’s ambitions, the overhead of the studio that made it, and how many years it’s been in development, it’s safe to assume that it needs to sell at least a few million copies before it starts making any money, but that’s just assumption. Only time will tell if it will be a commercial success for BioWare, which is desperate for a win after Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Video from ComicBook.com

If you consider some of the numbers RPGs have posted on Steam this year, less than 90K isn’t the most impressive number. Dragon’s Dogma 2 released earlier this year and peaked at 228,585 concurrent users on Steam. This ruins Dragon Age: The Veilguard. And this was achieved using a less popular IP. The first Dragon’s Dogma sold eight million copies, four million less than Dragon Age: Inquisition. However, due to this smaller install base, it crushed Steam at launch, something Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to replicate.

During its release, Dragon’s Dogma 2 only sold 2.5 million units. If the difference between two games on console is the same as the difference between two games on Steam, then Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t even reach a million copies sold during its release period.

Perhaps a more damning comparison is the indie RPGs Hades 2, Enshrouded and The Last Epoch, all released this year and performing significantly better on Steam than their AAA RPG counterparts. Moreover, two of these games have not even been released yet, but are in early access.

Steam Peak of the biggest RPGs of 2024

• Black Myth: Wukong – 2,415,714
• Last Epoch – 264,708
• Dragon’s Dogma 2 – 228,585
• Shrouded – 160 405
• Hades 2 – 103 567

Obviously, Dragon Age: The Veilguard doesn’t come close to Black Myth: Wukong, but that’s an unfair comparison considering it’s one of the biggest releases of the generation, which a new Dragon Age game will never be.

It’s just the beginning, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t off to the best start. However, this is not a bad start either. The question is how many copies is EA going to sell? Until we know this, we will not know whether it succeeded or not. What is clear, however, is that the game is not the commercial failure that some had suggested before it was released this week.