Latest news with #DragonAge
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Will Electronic Arts (EA) be Able to Close the Valuation Gap?
Maple Tree Capital, an investment management company, released its Q1 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. Q1 2025 saw a strong start but turned sour due to tariff concerns and macroeconomic fears, leading to a sharp market pullback, with the Nasdaq falling nearly 22% from its highs and the S&P 500 down 20%. Despite the challenges, the firm made significant progress this quarter by averaging in the top-conviction stocks, utilizing covered calls, and exercising patience. Maple's growth-oriented fund, Jonagold, has become a standout performer, greatly surpassing all major benchmarks since its launch in 2023. While Heartwood is still facing difficulties. Maple Tree Capital's Jonagold returned -13.64% in Q1 compared to the Nasdaq's -10.26% return and the Russel 2000's -9.48% return. Maple Tree Capital's Heartwood returned -18.04% in Q1 vs. the S&P 500's -4.27% and the Dow Jones' -0.87% return. In addition, please check the fund's top five holdings to know its best picks in 2025. In its first-quarter 2025 investor letter, Maple Tree Capital highlighted stocks such as Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA). Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) markets, publishes, and delivers games, content, and services for game consoles, PCs, and mobile phones. The one-month return of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) was 1.23%, and its shares have appreciated by 11.93% over the past 52 weeks. On May 28, 2025, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) closed at $146.88 per share, with a market capitalization of $36.833 billion. Maple Tree Capital stated the following regarding Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) in its Q1 2025 investor letter: "Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) trades at a 33x earnings multiple due to heavy R&D spend, yet it trades below 20x free cash flow. This is a disconnect between near-term profitability and long-term value creation. Electronic Arts has consistently invested more in R&D than its peers, positioning itself to lead in the AI-driven future of gaming. While their new game Dragon Age was by all means a 'flop' and video game trends softened into the Q1, EA's position is still extremely strong with their licensing power. It is only a matter of time before an activist stake could help close this valuation gap by pushing for clearer capital allocation, improved communication and a stronger focus on user experience." Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 43 hedge fund portfolios held Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) at the end of the first quarter, which was 45 in the previous quarter. In Q1 2025, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) reported net revenue of $1.9 billion, on a GAAP basis, up 7% from Q1 2024. While we acknowledge the potential of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the undervalued AI stock set for massive gains. In another article, we covered Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) and shared the list of best gaming stocks to invest in according to billionaires. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2025 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors. READ NEXT: Michael Burry Is Selling These Stocks and A New Dawn Is Coming to US Stocks. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ex-BioWare Lead Says The Dragon Age Team Didn't Feel Supported During Veilguard Development
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways It's no secret that the game that would become Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a troubled development. However, every time a new story comes out about how studio in-fighting and corporate favoritism affected the project, it feels like more of a miracle that the fantasy RPG got out the door looking like a classic BioWare game. Mark Darrah, the former executive producer of the Dragon Age series, has released a new YouTube video in which he discusses how a few events in 2017 fundamentally changed the trajectory of the RPG studio and how, according to him, Dragon Age was thrown under the bus in more ways than one during this time. Darrah's 16-minute video runs down how things shifted at BioWare in the months leading up to Mass Effect: Andromeda's launch in 2017, a period of change that he calls 'the most impactful 12 months' in the studio's history. In late 2016 Darrah, who had been working on Dragon Age, began instead leading the team that would oversee the closing months of the sci-fi RPG's development cycle. He explains that his transfer felt like a blow to the Dragon Age team, which was then working on one of the early iterations of the fantasy series' fourth entry, as Darrah had been a key member of its leadership. However, Darrah thought that by helping ship Andromeda, he could then see the resources dedicated to the game reallocated to help the Dragon Age team develop the fantasy RPG. But unfortunately, that's not what happened. 'My feeling at the time was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around,' Darrah says in the video. 'They were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or from [publisher] EA, which was basically true.' Darrah says his coming on to help with Andromeda was irregular at the time, as it was the first time the studio had a 'leadership discontinuity,' in which a person in charge of one project that was in active development left it to work on another. Darrah says the short time he spent working on Andromeda didn't ultimately have much of an impact on Dragon Age's development, but it did set a precedent establishing that leadership could be moved around within the company, even if they were in the middle of directing something else. This move contributed to a perception that Dragon Age wasn't a priority within the company. Darrah goes on to explain how the relationship between BioWare and EA changed at this time, as the studio started reporting to a different arm of the publisher. Prior to this, BioWare was 'strangely' reporting to higher-ups in the company's sports section, a group which Darrah described as 'benignly disinterested,' allowing the studio to work more autonomously. Then, when things shifted in 2017, BioWare started reporting to a branch of EA that was 'hyper interested' in the decision-making process. According to Darrah, this change in leadership was likely part of why the studio moved on from Andromeda so quickly, canceling the game's planned DLC and putting the sci-fi series on ice. 'The group that we reported into had very little stake in either the success or the failure of [Mass Effect: Andromeda], and they had a lot more incentive for BioWare to move on to the next thing that they could tie themselves to and show themselves as having influence on the development of,' Darrah said. As BioWare geared up for the next game, the much-maligned looter shooter Anthem, Darrah says he received 'assurances' from EA and BioWare leadership that Dragon Age was important to the company, but not the kinds of developers and resources that would back those statements up. And it was all made a lot more complicated by the return of ex-Mass Effect director Casey Hudson, who rejoined the company as its general manager in 2017. Darrah says he learned about Hudson's return at the same time as the rest of the company, despite being a senior member of BioWare's leadership team. He says he considered the decision to bring Hudson back without consulting him a sign of 'an immense amount of disrespect,' and he sent emails shortly after the announcement that said he expected Hudson would make a call to 'starve' Dragon Age of resources as the studio went all-hands-on-deck on Anthem. Darrah was once again reassured by leadership that Dragon Age was important to the company and that they were committed to him leading the project. 'As we all know, that's not what happened at all,' Darrah says. 'In very short order, in basically exactly the way that I predicted, Anthem was seen as needing greater leadership support, and myself and some other very senior people, and a large percentage of the Dragon Age team, was moved onto Anthem.' This was followed by the scaling down of BioWare's Montreal studio, which saw many staff members moved to other teams across the EA umbrella. Darrah says that the Montreal team had 'basically been lied to' and were told that the Dragon Age team 'didn't want' them. He also claims that he was trying to get the next Dragon Age past a certain development threshold which he hoped might allow him to retain those developers, but EA higher-ups who were local in Montreal wanted those people, and 'proximity is a powerful tool.' 'If you are someone who's been mad at me since 2017 because you feel like I abandoned you in Montreal, know that that's not what happened,' Darrah says. 'Know that I fought with every tool that I knew how to wield to try and keep you, but the organization had no interest in that occurring.' Whatever the circumstances, Darrah says EA wasn't interested in helping the Dragon Age team grow; it wanted Anthem to get off the ground and be a huge live-service hit for the company. Darrah hypothesizes that, at this point, management pivoted the Dragon Age project into the now-scrapped live-service game as a 'rationalization' for removing many members of the team and putting them to work on Anthem. Now that the next Dragon Age was going back to the drawing board, it could be argued that the project didn't need that big of a team in its early production stages. The move also resulted in a longer 'leadership discontinuity,' as Darrah worked on Anthem until the game shipped in 2019. 'I talked a fairly long time ago about how EA buys studios and then consumes them and they start to lose their culture into the overall EA culture,' Darrah said. 'To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought nine years earlier in 2008.' Darrah acknowledges that much of his story might sound like a series of events that affected him personally rather than the studio at large, but a handful of ex-BioWare employees have shared the video on social media and corroborated the events described. Darrah's claims also line up with Kotaku's previous reporting on Anthem's development, in which sources told us about how the loot shooter took up much of the company's resources, further complicating the development of what would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Darrah left BioWare in 2020, but returned to consult onThe Veilguard in 2023. After 10 years of tortured development, that game finally launched in 2024 as a single-player, story-driven RPG and was divisive in the ways Dragon Age games often are. In January, BioWare was restructured to be a one-game studio, resulting in layoffs for some of the company's veteran talent. The team that remains is working on Mass Effect 5. 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Forbes
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' Has Sold Two Million Copies In 12 Days, Deserves More
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Sandfall Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has already made history as the highest user-scored game on Metacritic by a significant margin (9.7/10 with nothing else above a 9.3), but now it's starting to get sales that reflect its quality. Sandfall has announced that just 12 days after launch, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold 2 million copies, a wild success for a brand new IP made by a brand new, tiny developer. For context, EA reported 1.5 million players 'engaged with' Dragon Age: The Veilguard in its first fiscal quarter , which was half what they wanted, and that also included players using their EA Play subscriptions. Blown out of the water here. That was of course a much worse game than Expedition 33, which is already being called one of the best RPGs possibly ever, mentioned in conversation with the decades-long Final Fantasy series and again this is a first offering from the brand and studio. Totally insane. For me personally, not only do I agree with all the praise, I've personally forced at least three of my friends to buy the game and surprise, all of them like it. When word of mouth spreads this quickly, this is how you speed toward two million sales in under two weeks. Metacritic Metacritic With Grand Theft Auto 6 booted out of 2025, there is a much greater chance that Expedition 33 could win GOTY this year (not that GTA 6 would have been a guarantee, but still). However, in this third of the year alone we've also seen the stunning Split/Fiction and Blue Prince. Still, I don't think anything has seen this level of hype and public reception (Split Fiction has an 8.9 on Metacritic, Blue Prince has a 7.7). I genuinely believe we're looking at a generational game here, and honestly, I'm surprised the game press didn't score it even higher, albeit its 92 is tied with Blue Prince for the best game of 2025 so far. I'm wondering just how high Expedition 33 ride Esquie in terms of long-term sales, but at this point it's already a brilliant success and everything else is just icing. This is clearly the birth of a very important RPG franchise, and if you want to get in on the ground floor I would highly recommend picking this game up. I don't care if you don't like RPGs or turn-based games (I don't), it fixes that, and is a must-play. Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , Bluesky and Instagram . Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Mass Effect And Dragon Age Teams ‘Didn't Get Along,' According To Ex-BioWare Dev
David Gaider, the co-founder of Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical developer Summerfall Studios, has opened up a bit more about his time at BioWare, where he served as the original lead writer on the Dragon Age series. Taking to social media, he chose to explain more about his decision to leave the studio in 2016 and the apparently tense relationship between the Mass Effect and Dragon Age teams within the company. In a lengthy Bluesky thread, Gaider described BioWare's years under co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk as 'the height' of the studio's time, though he also says he recognizes that issues like crunch and mismanagement were worse than he realized until after he left the company. He describes frustration with his own lack of upward momentum, as he was passed over for the role of Dragon Age's creative director in favor of Mike Laidlaw. He says he was eventually won over by Laidlaw's leadership and that the fantasy series benefited from it, but after he left the series to work on something else, things started to change. Gaider asked to move on to something else within BioWare after Dragon Age: Inquisition's launch in 2014, and it was between either Mass Effect: Andromeda or 'Dylan,' the game that would become Anthem, the studio's ill-fated loot shooter. Opting to work on the latter, he says the experience illuminated tensions between the different BioWare teams and that he felt the Anthem team didn't want him there. 'You see, the thing you need to know about BioWare is that for a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team,' Gaider wrote. 'Run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn't get along. The company was aware of the friction and attempts to fix it had been ongoing for years, mainly by shuffling staff between the teams more often. Yet this didn't really solve things, and I had no idea until I got to the Dylan team. The team didn't want me there. At all.' Gaider says that some of his conflict with the Anthem team came from higher-up instructions to write something more 'science fantasy,' similar to Star Wars, whereas the original concept had been more of a 'beer & cigarettes' sci-fi world similar to Aliens. According to Gaider, he was frequently given feedback that his ideas were 'too Dragon Age.' 'I won't go into detail about the problems except to say it became clear this was a team that didn't want to make an RPG,' Gaider wrote. 'Were very anti-RPG, in fact. Yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I'd need to actually do that.' After it became clear that that the project wasn't a good fit for him, Gaider told BioWare's bosses that he'd stick with it if there was some kind of promotion on the other side, and when he was turned down, he quit and went on to co-found Summerfall Studios. The studio's first game, Stray Gods, is a musical game following a modern version of the Greek god pantheon. It launched in 2023, and a DLC focusing on Orpheus was released the following year. BioWare has been going through a lot of turmoil in the past few months. After the underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the studio was restructured, resulting in layoffs of veteran talent and a company-wide pivot to focus solely on the fifth Mass Effect the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Top of the flops: just what does the games industry deem ‘success' any more?
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 Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion 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. Wait! The Sims is a lot bleaker than I remember Football Manager 25 video game cancelled after series of delays 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 pushingbuttons@
