Topping Steam Charts is like being a "New York Times Best Seller." Its a meaninglessly low bar to clear that basically anything with a little money behind it will accomplish.
A AAA game needs a huge fumble to not make it on the list, of which DA has a decently sized built in fanbase already to dodge that.
Let's assume 100k sales (to account for console and people who bought and didn't play yet) for it. That's only about 6 million dollars before any taxes or cuts are taken out. Steam will take almost 2 million of that off the top themselves (unless EA has a special deal worked out).
So even being generous, they made less than 4 million dollars on this game so far. A game in development for a decade from one of the biggest studios out there under the notorious "it needs to sell 10 million copies or we shut down your company" EA banner.
This is a massively loss no matter how you spin it once you think about numbers.
Topping Steam Charts is like being a "New York Times Best Seller." Its a meaninglessly low bar to clear that basically anything with a little money behind it will accomplish.
A AAA game needs a huge fumble to not make it on the list, of which DA has a decently sized built in fanbase already to dodge that.
Let's assume 100k sales (to account for console and people who bought and didn't play yet) for it. That's only about 6 million dollars before any taxes or cuts are taken out. Steam will take almost 2 million of that off the top themselves (unless EA has a special deal worked out).
So even being generous, they made less than 4 million dollars on this game so far. A game in development for a decade from one of the biggest studios out there under the notorious "it needs to sell 10 million copies or we shut down your company" EA banner.
This is a massively loss no matter how you spin it once you think about numbers.
They also released it before holiday season when it would've had actual competition