Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens as BioWare's best Steam launch with 70K concurrent players

Dragon Age: The Veilguard released on Halloween, and as a treat for BioWare, became the studio's biggest Steam game.

Per SteamDB, the action-RPG sports 70,414 concurrent players at time of writing. Against its predecessors, that puts it well ahead of 2009's Dragon Age: Origins (7,089 players) and 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition (4,964 players). Steam numbers for Dragon Age II are unavailable.

As for BioWare overall, 2021's Mass Effect: Legendary Edition comes in behind Veilguard at 59,817 players. Save for 2019's Anthem, most of the studio's games from 2004 to now are on Valve's platform.

While EA and BioWare have not revealed any hard sales numbers, Veilguard is also the publisher's biggest single-player Steam launch, just slightly beating out last year's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (67,855 players). Earlier this week, the game received fairly positive reviews, and BioWare has been heavily marketing the game since its reveal over the summer.

All roads lead back to Steam

Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Steam numbers are further notable since it was advertised as a game native to the platform. On PC, EA games typically require an Origin login, but BioWare repeatedly stressed its game had no requirement, and that it was fully playable on Steam Deck.

In the past year, other publishers have gradually returned to the Steam fold and brought their games over. Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws is coming to the platform later in November to boost sales, and Assassin's Creed Shadows has already been promised as a day-one Steam game.

Activision Blizzard ported over older Call of Duty titles to the platform, then brought over Blizzard's Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV.