Dragon Age is one of the most consistently praised Western RPG series across its various entries, achieving both critical and commercial success for its publisher EA. The latest entry Dragon Age: The Veilguard therefore saw a mounting wave of anticipation leading up to its release, made more immense by the 10-year wait since the previous game. This new game continues directly off of the story BioWare built for the previous entry in the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, but follows a new cast of characters with the developer’s trademark knack for deep and charming personalities.
In this article, we’re looking at the performance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard on live-streaming platforms, including chat sentiment for the title and how it stacks up against the pantheon of other fantastic RPGs released in the past year like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Hooks in New Players with Action-oriented Gameplay
Dragon Age: The Veilguard made an undeniably strong impression on live streaming upon its release. In its debut week, Dragon Age: The Veilguard generated 4.7M hours watched with a peak viewership of 207K. This performance matches the game’s resounding success on Steam, hitting a peak concurrent player count of 89K (that’s 21K higher than EA’s previous record peak concurrent player count for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor at 68K). The game’s warm reception is another win for EA, which earlier this year hit big with sports game EA College Football 25.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a perfect melding of EA’s business sense with BioWare’s excellent storytelling. For starters, Dragon Age: The Veilguard shifted its combat towards a more action-oriented approach, pushing it into the realm of an action RPG. We’ve seen a similar trend among series like Final Fantasy with Final Fantasy XVI which, although lamented by some older fans, has generally been well received by modern audiences. Additionally, the reworked combat is backed up by BioWare’s in-depth character work (see: Mass Effect 2) that adds real meaning to the gameplay and sidequests.
For starters, Dragon Age: The Veilguard shifted its combat towards a more action-oriented approach, pushing it into the realm of an action RPG. We’ve seen a similar trend among series like Final Fantasy with Final Fantasy XVI which, although lamented by some older fans, has generally been well received by modern audiences. Additionally, the reworked combat is backed up by BioWare’s in-depth character work (see: Mass Effect 2) that adds real meaning to the gameplay and sidequests.
This impressive viewership came from a relatively small airtime of 125K hours, suggesting that a few big-name streamers were largely responsible for bringing eyes onto the game. The data backs this up, with massive streaming personalities like zackrawrr and CohhCarnage pulling in 430K and 244K hours watched from Dragon Age: The Veilguard content, respectively. These two also represent a broader trend among the top streamers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Almost all of them are Twitch streamers (the one exception in the top 10 being HeelvsBabyface with 104K hours watched). These creators were a massive boon to the game’s overall reach, hitting far higher numbers than EA’s official stream on Steam (just 63K hours watched).
Twitch and Kick Chat Show Their Support for BioWare’s Characters
It wasn’t just streamers that were attracted to Dragon Age: The Veilguard – viewers showed their support for the game as well. In its first week, 240K chatters on Twitch and Kick sent 3.3M messages on Dragon Age: The Veilguard streams. Among these messages, the sentiment was generally positive with 22.7% positive messages versus just 12.2% negative messages. For a game that had such a loft legacy to live up to, this kind of welcoming reception is impressive.
Many of the messages focused on viewers supporting their favorite Dragon Age: The Veilguard characters by spamming their names in chat. Among the main cast, “Rook”, “Neve”, and “Lucanis” received the most attention with 7.2K, 6K, and 3.7K chat mentions, respectively. After a long drought of 10 years, fans were happy to see BioWare doing what they do best: “Character” work (21K mentions) with a blend of RPG-focused “fun” (16K mentions). Many also called out the more “action RPG” focus of this latest entry (766 mentions).
EA and BioWare Find Their Groove With RPGs on Live Streaming
Looking at BioWare’s catalog of games released in the past few years reveals a sadly short list of just three titles: New entry Dragon Age: The Veilguard, remastered classics in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and online action RPG Anthem. Although Anthem was not well-received by BioWare fans, the hype propelled it to the highest debut week viewership of the three titles with 5.4M hours watched. This was helped by the online nature of the game being particularly conducive to live-streaming coverage. Still, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s performance was respectable even given this handicap.
But the real test for this game is pitting it against other recently released RPGs. Amidst a flood of excellent RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring (with its Shadow of the Erdtree DLC), it can be hard for any other RPG titles to make an impact. Perhaps the best comparison from this year is Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 which brought in a massive 19M hours watched in its first week – over 4x the viewership of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. While the player base was a big win for EA, the RPG genre is quickly becoming saturated which means exceptional titles are needed to grab viewer attention.
It seems that for now, EA and BioWare’s plan is to regroup and focus their full attention on the next Mass Effect game, with no DLC being planned for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This makes good business sense (given that Mass Effect is their most successful series critically and commercially), but will still be heartbreaking for Dragon Age fans. Meanwhile, EA will push for higher viewership and player numbers with other series like EA College Football and their revamped plan for The Sims. Stream Hatchet will be watching for more updates in the coming months.
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