Top of the flops: just what does the games industry deem ‘success' any more?

The Guardian

12-02-2025

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn't the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment.
Sales did not meet the publisher's expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month? If a book sells 10,000 copies in a week it's considered a bestseller. Even at the height of its popularity in the 90s, no Tomb Raider game ever sold more than a few million. Square Enix's expectations were clearly unrealistic. It wouldn't be the last time; in a 2016 interview with Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XV's director, he told me that game needed to sell 10m to succeed.
Last week in an earnings call, EA's executives had to explain a shortfall in profits. It was driven mostly by EA FC, the ubiquitous football series whose revenue was down on the previous year, but CEO Andrew Wilson also singled out the long-awaited RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which came out last October. '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,' he said.
Dragon Age has 'reached 1.5 million players' in the months since launch, which presumably includes people paying via subscription services as well as direct sales. If 3.4m was a disappointment for Square Enix in 2013, you can only imagine that 1.5m was a disaster for EA in 2024, when games cost multiples more to make.
However, as Polygon's Maddy Myers points out in a detailed analysis of comparable games, 1.5m is more than Metaphor: ReFantazio (1m), and not much less than the second part of the Final Fantasy VII remake (2m) over comparable time periods. Dragon's Dogma, the genre's breakout hit last year, sold 3.3m over six months.
In those terms, Dragon Age was certainly not a flop. I can only come to the same conclusion as Myers: EA's expectations were unrealistic. The company was expecting an instant mega-hit from a game in a series that had sat dormant for 10 years. The Veilguard had been rebooted and reworked several times over a tortuous development period, during which time BioWare struggled enormously. Having previously made standard-setting role-playing games in Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: The Old Republic, its only releases since 2014 were Mass Effect: Andromeda (disappointing) and mech shooter Anthem (broken). Meanwhile, a different developer had an enormous hit with a series that BioWare itself established: Baldur's Gate, which sold 15m.
The developers at BioWare have suffered the fallout from this. The studio is now down to a relatively bare bones staff of 100, and it seems EA will not be giving it the chance to build on what it achieved with The Veilguard. It's a miracle that game exists at all.
I've written a lot in this newsletter about the ridiculously high stakes of modern video game development; it's clear that a more sustainable path needs to be forged. But in 2025 as in 2013, short-termism and unrealistic expectations on a corporate level stand in the way. That Tomb Raider reboot ended up selling more than 14m over time, more than any other game in the series. First-quarter sales cannot be used as the first and final measure of a game's success. Nintendo's principle of selling the same games for literally decades has meant that plenty of mid-selling titles have become million-sellers over time.
There was also a point in EA's history – indeed in most publishers' history – where the portfolio was more important than each individual game's profitability. The likes of EA FC and Call of Duty were the bankable successes that could fund the rest of the slate, allowing those publishers to make room for the next surprise success. Not every game released in a year by a given company was expected to be a mega-hit. As long as the overall slate was profitable, there was space for the critically acclaimed or fan-pleasing games that didn't break out of their niche.
The space for those games now appears to be confined to independent developers and the smaller publishers that overtly support them. Mike Laidlaw, the director of the first three Dragon Age games, left BioWare in 2017 and formed a new studio in 2020; its first game, Eternal Strands, came out last month and is picking up great word-of-mouth buzz. By all accounts it's a banger – and its team haven't had to labour under the expectation of instant success.
While Waiting came out a few days ago, an unusual game that feels like a playable version of those slice-of-life newspaper cartoons. You play through the life of an incredibly regular guy, from birth through waiting for exam results through all the banal moments of his existence at the doctor's surgery, crossing the road, waiting for new software updates to finally finish their endless install cycles. You can do absolutely nothing, or mess around in each scene to amuse yourself. It's an interactive version of the adage that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, a small celebration of embracing the mundane.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch
Estimated playtime: 5 hours
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PlayStation Network went down for almost a whole day at the weekend, prompting an tsunami of complaints from disappointed gamers looking forward to their weekend multiplayer sessions. Sony called it an 'operational issue' and apologised by giving PlayStation Plus subscribers five extra days of play.
A Bloomberg report (£) digs into the absolute state of things at Warner Bros' game division, whose CEO recently departed after a string of underperforming titles, culminating in last year's Suicide Squad. Even ongoing sales of mega-hit Hogwarts Legacy couldn't save it from a $300m loss last year.
Two pieces of consumer-rights-related news: Steam has quietly added warning labels to early access games that have been 'abandoned' by their developers (ie, they've had no updates for many months); and the UK government has responded to a petition urging it to prohibit game developers from shutting down their live games, thus rendering them unplayable.
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Loads of you recommended your favourite video game stories for last week's questioner, Natalie. There are so many banger recommendations that I've been shouting 'YES!' at my inbox all week. Thanks to Lawal, Emma, Jude, Toby and Phill for these picks:
The Forgotten City (branching narrative indie mystery game), Mass Effect 2 (perilous science-fiction), 80 Days (globetrotting illustrated text adventure), Her Story (wonderfully clever detective game), Kathy Rain: A Detective is Born (well acted 90s-style point-and-click adventure), We Happy Few (dodgy gameplay but characters that really stay in your head), Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader (nails its worldbuilding), Xenogears (a weird and iconic classic), Breath of Fire III (poignant retro RPG), Red Dead Redemption II (long-winded but peerless western), Eliza (sparsely written and well acted), The Witcher trilogy (grimy dark fantasy, 3 is my fave), Half-Life and its sequel (the ultimate first-person story), What Remains of Edith Finch (anthology style magical realist tragedy), and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (uneasy pastoral English supernatural mystery).
I'll tackle a fresh question next week. If you've one to send in – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on [e-mail].