The year 2024 will be remembered as one of the worst years for AAA game development, with numerous major studios and publishers releasing some of the biggest financial failures in gaming history. Among them, Sony’s alleged $400 million loss on Concord stands out as the most significant. However, a close second was EA and BioWare’s attempt to revive the Dragon Age franchise after a decade-long absence.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was one of many AAA titles that failed in the market, largely due to its heavy emphasis on DEI initiatives, prioritizing ethnic and sexual representation over authenticity and convincing narratives and design. These ideological influences were apparent not only in the game’s story but also in its character aesthetics, which many found unappealing.
EA and BioWare have been hinting at a continuation of Dragon Age: Inquisition since December 2018, when they released the first teaser trailer. It is reasonable to assume development started before that date, yet it wasn’t until June 2024 that players finally saw what BioWare had been working on.
When the game was officially reintroduced as The Veilguard, many, including myself, criticized its reveal trailer for featuring unattractive character designs, including a Qunari character seemingly created to represent a non-binary or transgender identity.
From that point onward, the game drifted even further from its roots as a classic medieval RPG set in a world of magic and dragons, instead embracing themes of modern politics and gender ideology. Leading the project was Corinne Busche, formerly known as Andrew Busche, a longtime EA employee who began his career as an environmental artist on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series before moving to The Sims franchise.
Busche spent a decade working on The Sims series, from The Sims 3 to The Sims 4, a game widely recognized for its emphasis on progressive social themes. Recent updates to The Sims 4 introduced features such as cuckolding and transgender surgery scars, though notably only for biological male Sims, with no equivalent representation for women who have undergone mastectomies due to breast cancer. Very inclusive!
Andrew, who now identifies as Corinne, transitioned to BioWare in 2019 and took on the role of director for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2022. Under Andrew’s leadership, the game appears to have been significantly reworked or restarted mid-development, seemingly to align with personal and ideological priorities.
Andrew, who has described themselves with terms like “Queerosexual Gendermancer,” proudly announced that after years of development, The Veilguard would feature extensive pansexual romance options. Players would be able to pursue relationships with any of the companions, all of whom would also engage in relationships with one another throughout the game’s story to create a more “lively and inclusive” experience.
Then came the real bombshell, Dragon Age: The Veilguard would push inclusivity even further under Andrew Busche’s leadership by becoming the first mainstream AAA game to allow players to equip their created character with breast scars. This feature was explicitly designed to cater to transgender individuals, particularly trans people who have undergone “top surgery.”
Like many other games influenced by ESG ideology, The Veilguard includes various “inclusive” customization options, such as vitiligo sliders and the ability to adjust a character’s bust and hip size.
However, despite these features, any changes made to bust size appeared to have no noticeable effect, as the game seemingly restricted female characters from having breasts larger than an A cup. This design choice likely stemmed from an aversion to appealing to heterosexual players, ensuring that no female character’s proportions exceeded those of a transgender woman for true equality.
Unsurprisingly, the game was a resounding failure upon release. Its narrative was heavily infused with modern identity politics, including the option to explicitly define the player character as transgender in official in-game dialogue.
A key moment in Taash’s story arc even revolves around her returning home to her parents, only to proudly declare that she identifies as non-binary.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard spent years in development, beginning sometime before December 2018, but wasn’t officially revealed until early 2024. Corinne (formerly Andrew) Busche didn’t take over as director until 2022, suggesting that BioWare may have scrapped its original concept and shifted direction midway through its six-year plus development cycle, likely to accommodate the ideological priorities of its recently appointed transgender director in 2022.
Despite glowing 9/10 reviews from activist journalists, consumer interest was far less enthusiastic. The game peaked at just 89,418 concurrent players on Steam a number of media outlets attempted to spin positively by calling it EA’s most-played title on the platform.
However, this distinction is misleading, as earlier Dragon Age titles and many other EA-published games were not available on Steam until 2020.
For a large-scale RPG that spent well over six years in development, 90,000 peak players is far from a profitable outcome. To this day, EA has yet to disclose official sales figures for The Veilguard, in stark contrast to Dragon Age: Inquisition, which surpassed 1.14 million units sold in its first week back in 2014.
Given the rising costs of AAA development, The Veilguard would likely need to at least triple that figure to break even yet EA has remained conspicuously silent.
BioWare openly admitted that The Veilguard would receive no post-release DLC expansions, marking a first for the franchise. Every previous Dragon Age title had featured full-scale expansions, yet this decision strongly suggested that the game’s internal performance and expectations were so low that continued development wasn’t financially justifiable.
Despite being portrayed by sympathetic journalists as the victim of a so-called “hate mob” for producing one of the most widely criticized and unappealing games in recent memory, Corinne Busche has officially announced his departure from BioWare, ending an 18-year career at Electronic Arts.
SmashJT shared details from an internal email, later verified by a source within EA, in which Busche announced his departure from BioWare to pursue new projects. While Busche framed this as a voluntary exit, it’s entirely possible the decision was forced following the underwhelming performance of The Veilguard.
The game fell far short of sales expectations and faced widespread criticism, leading some to view this leadership change as an attempt to stabilize the struggling studio. However, it is unlikely to change BioWare or EA’s trajectory, as the company is now shifting focus toward yet another questionable Mass Effect revival.
Shortly after the leaks surfaced, Corinne (formerly Andrew) Busche formally announced his departure, claiming he had been offered an opportunity to build a new RPG that he “couldn’t turn down.”
This trend, however, is emblematic of the deeper issues plaguing the gaming industry. Major corporations from Sony to Microsoft and even Nintendo have increasingly prioritized politically driven initiatives like Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies, turning video games into ideological battlegrounds.
Modern game development is now hyper-focused on race, identity, and sexuality, at the expense of creativity and quality. Character design is shaped by narratives of guilt, envy, and ideological supremacy, with industry workers openly stating that there are “too many white people” in gaming, that gamers are a “mistake” and that we soon won’t have any games to buy, which if true would ultimately result in the loss of their job.
This is of course excluding the forced LGBT representation typically resulting in uninspired, generic, and tokenized characters that lack genuine depth.
Even in games created by predominantly White teams, there’s a strong push, particularly from White women in the industry, to impose diversity and inclusivity on their products. This often results in the erasure of one race in favor of tokenized, unattractive depictions of others, and the diminishing of femininity.
The portrayal of attractive women, regardless of their race is deemed sexist or demeaning, replaced by female protagonists who are designed to appear overly masculine or excessively strong. These games, created by political activists for political activists, are increasingly failing in the market.
Consumers are unwilling to be guilted by developers or journalists into purchasing products from creators who hold them in disdain, no matter how often they are labeled as racist, bigoted, or sexist.
Deranged individuals like Andrew Bursche, who identifies as a woman, have risen within the industry, influencing its direction to align with broader financial agendas, including those driven by major investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Blackstone. This shift has led to a focus on designing games through the lens of diversity and inclusivity, sometimes at the expense of authenticity, with every aspect of game development now being measured against these principles.
This shift in focus has become prevalent across nearly every major AAA game development company worldwide, whether American, French, or Japanese. As a result, experienced talent is often replaced with less experienced hires focused on diversity, leading to a situation where some may view game design as just a job.
These individuals use their positions of authority to push their personal ideologies onto consumers, raping mainstream franchises one after the other. What’s even more concerning is that when these individuals fail and mismanage a project, leading to significant financial losses, sometimes in the range of hundreds of millions there is little to no accountability.
Instead, they are replaced by another person with a similar agenda, perpetuating a cycle that continues to affect the industry.
Andrew did not publicly acknowledge any responsibility for the financial losses EA incurred from the game’s poor performance. Despite receiving high praise from biased gaming media outlets, the title faced significant criticism from the general public, highlighting a disconnect between industry narratives and consumer reception.
As for BioWare, its future remains set in stone. With Mass Effect 4 already in development, it is unlikely that EA would cancel the project or transfer it to another studio. Instead, BioWare will likely see the game through to release. However, when it too fails to meet expectations, the studio will likely face closure.
