Dragon Age: Origins was a flop

[Googledebunker]

Since people have been talking the long development time for Dragon Age: the Veilguard, and speculating on what the budget was, and how many copies were sold, I was curious about the development time and budget of Dragon Age: Origins, and I came across some really surprising information.

Dragon Age: Origins was a flop! it did not sell enough copies to cover the cost of its development. I will elaborate and provide the evidence that's available for my conclusion.

It took 6 years of development time from start to release and had over 180 employees working on it in that span.

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-first-draft-of-dragon-age-origins-didnt-even-have-grey-wardens#comments

EA said five years ago, in 2010, that DAO had sold 3.2m units, but hasn't said anything since.

Dragon Age: Origins remains a game from another era - an ambitious 'let's invent our own role-playing universe' of an idea that spiralled into six years of development. "As we got more and more toward the end, the crunch became so incredible," Gaider recalled, "and things were getting cut left and right." And to him, from where he was sitting, what was released was a hodgepodge - a "hacked, slap-dashed thing covered in band aids" - that he thought would seem "terrible".

As we can see from this article with Gaider the game sold 3.2m units, and took 6 years of development from start to finish,

Bioware employed more than 180 people to work on the development of the game, employed more than 144 voice-actors, and hired Inon Zur to compose the game's music.

Based on a Canadian wage survey conducted in 2005 the average wage in Edmonton for Professional Tech employees was $26.03 an hour at 40 hours a week that's $54,142 per developer per year. $54,142 for 180 employees comes out to $9,745,632 per year for a total of $58,473,792 for just the developers wages. That's just at 40 hours per week even though Mr. Gaider said that more towards the end there was an "incredible amount of crunch" so that is a low ball estimate on just the developers wages on average.

I was not able to find data on voice actor wages from that time period, but voice actors have historically been underpaid in the video game industry so I am using the Recreation average wage of $14.38 from the same wage survey log. Since voice actors usually aren't hired until the tail end of development I am estimating it to be about 2 years of their wages based on average industry standards for AAA games.
$14.38 at 40 hours per week is $29,910 per voice actor per year
$29,910 for 144 voice actors comes out to $4,307,097 per year for 2 years comes out to
$8,614,195

https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/5e977b8c-41f7-4763-ad4d-2f0723417dbd/resource/284e856b-a137-43d9-ad13-763710f36dff/download/2182773-2005-alberta-wage-salary-survey-average-wages-by-industry.pdf

Since there is no information on how long or what wage each voice actor got paid or the exact number of voice actors other than the estimated number offered being "more than 144" this is just a low ball estimate for their work at a wage from 2005, due to inflation they likely would have received slightly more.

Our combined estimated cost of development is now up to $67,087,987
the cost of leasing their original property 36,000sq ft at the average cost of $4.46 a sq ft per month is roughly $160,560 or $1.9 million per year for 6 years brings it up to approximately $11,560,320 bringing the total up to 78,648,307

the marketing budget for the game was rumored to be almost 75% of that which would be about $58,986,230, which brings up the cost to $137,634,537 that doesn't include EA recouping their acquisition costs from buying VG Holding Corp which included Bioware and Pandemic studios for $830,000,000


It took just over 3 months for the game to sell 3.2 million copies at $40 for the standard edition and $50 for the deluxe edition

There are no sales figures for the first month of launch but assuming they sold half the total of each 1.6 million standard is $64,000,000 and deluxe edition would be $80,000,000 we arrive at $144,000,000. as an absolute best case scenario, since each vendor takes roughly 30% of the cut for all sales would be $43,200,000 that brings Bioware's revenue down to $100,800,000 for the first 3 months of the games launch. Which means it was still in the red by $36,834,537 which means it was a flop.

Since we all know that EA pays for positive review scores who knows how much further into the red they were during Dragon Age Origins launch window, and given Bioware and EAs silence since that announcement at the 3 month mark it must've stagnated in sales, since EA usually announces new milestones when their games sell well.

Seems like the only Dragon Age game that wasn't a flop was Dragon Age: Inquisition which sold 12 million copies since it launched.

It's too bad too. I really liked Dragon Age: Origins, but since it flopped it must not have been as good as I thought, what a shame.

I am honestly not even sure how Bioware managed to stay open considering Dragon Age: Origins flopping and never making a profit, then Dragon Age 2 flopped. EA must have been suffering from sunk cost fallacy since they paid so much to acquire Bioware way past their prime which was Baldur's Gate 2, just been flop after flop since then. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news guys. Dragon Age Origins was a flop, this is a sad day, heck it's a retroactive sad 15 years. Dang..

[luke31s]

According to EA DA:O was a staggering critical and commercial success

https://www.ea.com/news/bioware-dragon-age-origins-reaches-triple-platinum-sales?isLocalized=true

[dulany67]

Originally posted by Marlon Brandolorian:

... Bioware way past their prime which was Baldur's Gate 2, just been flop after flop since then.

Well, this part allows me to categorize the rest of this post.

[gehenna]

Your numbers are based on rumors and speculation at best.

You say that there were 180 employees working on it. You don't show a source for that. And even if true that 180 might account for people who had very little to do with it, only worked on it for a short time, left the company, were involved in multiple projects etc. Also, at the start of development it usually is a small team that starts and then grows as the work expands. So your premise is faulty, very shaky at best.

Then you quote an average wage for tech workers, but we don't know whether or not that average holds for DA:O. Perhaps most of them worked well under that wage, which I suspect. Tech workers is also a very broad term. So your calculation, already based on a shaky foundation is compounded by more speculation.

And then to make matters worse you add rumors about the marketing budget. Rumors are just rumors, but still you just add the full 75% of the rumored amount...which already is based on a faulty foundation multiplied by an assumption. And then you multiply it by a rumored amount. There's waaaaaaay too much of a margin of error in there.

So to sum it up, your calculation is: faulty premise X speculation X rumors = massive assumption

Not a good take.

[luke31s]

From what i know only Jade Empire, Anthem and now DA:V are financial flops. Even Andromeda was a financial success

[Victor Simon]

Dragon Age Origins was a huge success. That's why they made an expansion: Awakening, and a bunch of DLCs after it. And in just one year they released Dragon Age 2, and a bunch of DLCs (a game made in a hurry just to take advantage of DAO's SUCCESS). Not to mention the comics, novels and merchandising. that sold as a result of the game. Their characters Morrigan, Alistair , Zevran... were very loved.
EA wouldn't have bought it if it had been a failure. Nor would there have been a sequel.
Failures don't have sequels. It's pure logic.
If they had released a remaster of the trilogy like they did with Mass Effect, the Dragon Age franchise would still be alive. Because it would have something to hold on to. After DAtV its future is uncertain.

[Comrade Cat]

The only thing this post really highlights is that we - as in players that don't know any insider info, really can't confidently estimate how much the game would cost or how well the game is doing in terms of sales with respect to the budget. Accounting is hard after all. Personally, I don't think DA:O was as bad as you claim it was. We know for a fact that DA:O was successfull and not just according to EA themselves, people that have worked on the game - like Mark Darrah (executive producer) have said before that the game was in fact profitable enough to warrant a sequel.

Going back to DA:V - people keep throwing around 250 million budget that this game supposedly had, but there's really nothing that suggest that the game actually costed EA so much. There's literally zero info about it on the internet - reliable or otherwise, no leaks, no insider claims, nothing. The only reason why I think people claim that DA:V costed 250 millions is that the same number was alledgedly the budget for Concord.

But one thing you have to understand is that Concord was considered to be a cornerstone title for Sony - it had the backing of many execs, they were bankrolling the develompent studio through and through. DA:V never had anything even close to such support from EA. Besides, there was an estimate that Mark Darrah (previously mentioned executive producer on DA:O) did on his YouTube channel - and according to him, for a game to cost 250 millions there have to be at least 800-900 devs working full-time on the game for about 3 years. This actually sounds pretty realistic for Concord - as I said, Sony really believed in this title and bankrolled it all the way, but for DA:V? Bruh, Bioware has about 250 devs tops - and that including people that are working on the next Mass Effect and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Then you might say: "But the game took ten years to develop!". Well, it didn't. It was in preproduction around 2016-2018 with a relatively small team until the first iteration was cancelled and most of the devs were moved to Anthem, The development have only resumed in earnest after that - so around 2019-2020. According to this, DA:V was in development for 4-5 years, which is still a pretty lengthy cycle, but definetely not long enough to spiral the budget out of control so much.

In short, there's really no way DA:V costed 250 millions to make - take at least half of that and you might get a more realistic evaluation, I think. So, DA:V doesn't need 5 millions of copies sold to break even. Only about 2.5-3 millions. And judging by Steam sales evaluation (~750k) - the game is likely already even if we factor in sales on the consoles. DA:I was very popular on the consoles - much more popular than on PC in fact. But even if we consider that the game sold similar amount of copies on XBOX and PS - that's roughly 2.25 millions already sold.

Sure, 2.25 millions in first 3 weeks doesn't sound like a commercial blockbuster EA was probably hoping for. Personally, I think DA:V have underperformed - I guess that's why EA doesn't announce any milestones, they're probably waiting for December holiday sales for the numbers to catch up, But it doesn't mean that the game is a big commercial flop either. Honestly, y'all should go on and hate another game at this point. Go on and poke some fun at Stalker 2 for a change - that ought to be more entertaining, I suppose.

[Sassy Robot]

So what if it lost money? It wouldn't surprise me if it did because CRPG's are not mainstream, and definitely were not mainstream in 2009. Games like BG3 are huge outliers in the RPG genre. Exceptions, not rules.

Dragon Age Origins could have lost every dollar they invested and it wouldn't change that it's a phenomenal game, and signals the end of an era at Bioware. Indeed, the end of an era of many formerly great developers like Blizzard and Bethesda depending on who you ask.

[Victor Simon]

Originally posted by Marlon Brandolorian:

Originally posted by Victor Simon:

Dragon Age Origins was a huge success. That's why they made an expansion: Awakening, and a bunch of DLCs after it. And in just one year they released Dragon Age 2, and a bunch of DLCs (a game made in a hurry just to take advantage of DAO's SUCCESS). Not to mention the comics, novels and merchandising. that sold as a result of the game. Their characters Morrigan, Alistair , Zevran... were very loved.
EA wouldn't have bought it if it had been a failure. Nor would there have been a sequel.
Failures don't have sequels. It's pure logic.
If they had released a remaster of the trilogy like they did with Mass Effect, the Dragon Age franchise would still be alive. Because it would have something to hold on to. After DAtV its future is uncertain.

It's okay if you like it, it just wasn't financially successful, it was a flop.

If so many people bought it and liked it, why does it have so few reviews? Call if Duty Modern Warfare 2 has 10s of thousands more reviews.

You'd think that a game that didn't flop, and sold millions of copies sold would have tons of positive reviews from players, but they're are barely 4 digit review counts on for it. Did EA have a bunch of negative reviews purged?

I mean lots of bad games get sequels. Kotor 2 was buggy incomplete, and rushed flop, but they still went ahead with making SWTOR, which was also a flop.

I heard some investors paid EA and Bioware to push an agenda in the game, like Sten. That companion was not good. Everyone says he is a poorly written companion. Even the positive user reviews talk about DA:O being bad.

You are partly right. The DAO's spending was probably exorbitant because it was a group of people who knew how to make games, but not so much about business. But sales were incredibly good for a new game (back in the day, when games weren't so accessible and you had to buy them in specialized stores). I think the important thing about a new business is the potential. And Dragon Age Origins had so many sequels... and comics, merchandising and a lot of passive income, that I think it makes it a real financial success. Many big companies have more expenses than income some years, but they are still solvent. And their stocks are highly valued on the stock exchange, because they have potential and customers.

[Insanieac]

Seems like this topic is about 15 yrs too late to be relevant

[Victor Simon]

Dragon Age Origins was a Total SUCCESS.

The OP forgot about the 1 million of downloadable content (DLCs, for example):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Origins#:~:text=It%20sold%20more%20than%203.2,greatest%20video%20games%20ever%20made.

And it sold more than 3 millions of copies in one year. Apart from that, it won over 30 Industry Awards

https://www.ea.com/news/bioware-dragon-age-origins-reaches-triple-platinum-sales?isLocalized=true

Not to mention all the merchandising that came after, and that DAO paved the way for the next Dragon Age games.

Over 3 million copies, and over 1 million of downloadable content. It's hard even for today's games to sell that much in a year.
15 years ago it was the definition of total success, especially in a genre like RPGs.

[Araignee]

So many people going on and on about how it's a failure, damn you need to move on man, you all are almost like an obsessed boyfriend that just can't let go, it's almost to the point of creepy.

[DEREK]

Originally posted by Araignee:

So many people going on and on about how it's a failure, damn you need to move on man, you all are almost like an obsessed boyfriend that just can't let go, it's almost to the point of creepy.

Gaming is a hobby that can extent beyond actual play of games, not a human relationship. Projection?

[Gabriel Angelos]

What you fail to take account of is that Origins sold 3.2 million copies in the FIRST 3 months of release. Dragon Age 2 barely broke 2 million and Inquisiton sold 6 million.

But what did they make as a profit? Well BioWare doesnt say alot but on Steam alone :

Origins profit is 6.7 million

Origins Ultimate edition (yes we all bought it again lmao) was 16.2 million dollars.

Dragon age 2 - 1.2 million

Inquisition - 8.1 million

So Origins has by far grossed more on Steam.

[76561199802160085]

Originally posted by bayomaycry:

this has to be bait.

No, OP is right, it's clear, and sad story of Bioware, they never found how sell a lot party RPG, I mean at AAA level. And Larian did it with BG3, but until Larian makes another AAA RPG we don't know if they know how do it, so repeat BG3.

[cimerians]

'Failure' in the eyes of a publisher not anyone else.

Origins was a success and the best written game in the series in my opinion with Inquisition probably coming very close, especially in many other areas. EA's sales 'issues' and budgeting is not our problem and does not dictate whether a game is truly a flop because a publisher says it didn't meet their astronomical budget and projections.

The devs/artists/writers/musicians make a game, we play it, and the point is both of those games and to a lesser degree IMO Dragon Age 2 was fun to play. (Cutting corners on dragon age 2 shows you what it was and what it could have been)

It's a successful series just like Mass Effect. Period.