Entertainment Media Admits Dragon Age: The Veilguard Bombed
One of life’s great pleasures is watching a smug creep admitting he was wrong, even if he tries to disguise it to save face. One such incident happened today, courtesy of Jason Schreier. Schreier is a games journalist currently working for Bloomberg who co-hosts a podcast called Triple Click; he used to write for Kotaku, and he’s published three books on the video game industry. With a résumé like that, you can probably guess what his opinion of gamers is, and last year, he was happy to share it. BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard was mocked for being insanely woke before it was released, with some ram monster going on for ages about how it was “non-binary,” another character demonstrating how to atone for misgendering someone, and in-game options suggesting you examine “the benefits of a multicultural background,” plus character customization features like “top surgery scars.” Remember, Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes place in a high fantasy world, not San Francisco in the 2020s, so this stuff is about as natural as tofu at a fast food joint. Upon its release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard netted 58,958 concurrent players on Steam on its opening day (which was Halloween) and reached 89,418 that Sunday, which wasn’t bad, though not what BioWare was expecting. And Jason Schreier was on X, gloating to gamers who didn’t want identity politics in their fantasy game and said familiar phrases like “Go woke, go broke” (image courtesy of That Park Place):
Since then, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has fallen off a cliff, big time, with steadily diminishing player counts on Steam, losing over half its players in less than a month and continuing to tumble. Today, its high was 1,038 concurrent players. There were also rumors that a lot of pre-orders were being refunded. It’s a disaster, in other words, and it has led to the game’s writers being fired from BioWare as they prepare for their new Mass Effect game – one for which they’ve hired the writers who made the older Mass Effect games successful, with talk of “reimagining” the way BioWare operates. That leads us to today, when Schreier published an article for Bloomberg admitting that Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a “debacle” and going into the many reasons why it crashed and burned. Schreier’s Bloomberg piece is behind a paywall, but That Park Place has the relevant information. Sure enough, after going on for what That Park Place says is 3000 words, Schreier failed to mention that going woke may have led to BioWare going broke vis-à-vis Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which is not surprising because ideologues like him (presumably) never want to admit when the philosophy they demand get pushed on people is rejected.
Regardless, it’s satisfying to see someone like Schreier, who mocked anyone who had a problem with transgender – or “non-binary,” or whatever classification – ideology being forced into a video game suddenly have to admit that the game he championed as a success was actually a bomb. He can save all the face he wants by keeping the woke injection out of his reasoning, much of which is fair, according to That Park Place, but still incomplete. His acknowledgment is an admission that Dragon Age: The Veilguard can no longer be spun as a hit that proved critics of wokeness and identity politics wrong. What will be interesting is if the new Mass Effect game is devoid of identity politics; what will games journalists say then? I think they simply won’t mention it. Why draw attention to how wrong you were in your declaration that everyone agrees with you? In a larger sense, it’s evidence that people who want wokeness driven from video games are winning, or at least making an impact. Something as obnoxious-looking as Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed despite being part of an established series, and the studio that made it was restructured as a result. That ain’t hay.
Let us know what you think of entertainment media admitting that Dragon Age: The Veilguard bombed in the comments!
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