Video Game Publishers

Dragon Age: The Veilguard was something of a dud, selling 1.5 million copies total, or about half what publisher EA was counting on. There were many reasons for that. One of them was not that it should have been a live-service game. But if you ask Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts CEO, that actually pretty neatly sums it up:

In order to break beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category. Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played; however, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.

If you have to lay off 185 people and close a studio and explore various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders because of one dud game, your business has a bigger problem than one dud game.