Obsidian Entertainment’s latest release, Avowed, failed to hit 20,000 peak concurrent players on Steam on its release day.
The game, which had a wide release on February 18th after being in Advanced Access since February 14th, only hit an all-time peak of 17,171 concurrent players on its release day.
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For comparison, BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard hit a peak concurrent of 89,418 concurrent players after it released at the end of October.
BioWare’s parent company Electronic Arts (EA) admitted the game was failure in a press release in the middle of January. It revealed, “Dragon Age engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.”
A week after that announcement on January 29th, BioWare General Manager Gary McKay announced that it laid off a number of employees and transferred others to other studios within EA. He wrote in a blog post, “We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.”
It would be revealed through social media posts that the entire writing and editing team for Dragon Age: The Veilguard was laid off.
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Avowed’s demise is not unsurprising. It was originally uncovered the game was pushing transgender ideology by using pronouns. This was then brought to the attention of Elon Musk, who commented, “Having pronouns in a fantasy video game is utterly unacceptable.”
Following Musk’s comments, Avowed Art Director Matt Hansen responded on BlueSky writing, “Sickos.jpg. I wanted so badly to make him mad with my game, and I cannot believe it actually happened. Just wait until you see the default, you said little shit.”
This was not the first time Hansen had taken issue with Musk. Back in March 2024, he reacted to a post from Musk, who wrote, “It should not be acceptable for any company in the gaming industry to be racist & sexist against ‘white guys.’”
Hansen responded, “Oh, Elon, you sweet summer child, this will only embolden me, you sad sack of s**t.”
It would then be uncovered that Hansen engaged in seemingly discriminatory practices while at Obsidian Entertainment. He posted back in 2020, “Reminder to Black artists out there who are looking for portfolio reviews or job advice: my DMs are open, and you will always have my priority.”
He added, “We got too many crusty white dudes in this field, please let me help you replace me one day - I want to go back to living in the woods.”
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Furthermore, in November, Hansen expressed his desire for supporters of Donald Trump to “feel the sting of shame for the rest of their putrid lives.”
What do you make of Avowed not even hitting 20,000 concurrent players on its first day?
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Since Obsidian didn't fire Hanson after those comments, it means they agree with what he said. I'm not going to support any company with those views.
Hopefully, these failures will (eventually) lead to the end of the Games as a Humiliation Ritual (GaaHR) era of modern gaming.
Will take more converged studios being closed, though.
Without the humiliation ritual aspects of Avowed, I might want to try it. But those aspects, internal and external to the game, overpower my mild interest.