Mike Laidlaw Says He Would Have Quit BioWare Had EA Mandated Live Service Elements In Games Like Dragon Age
Former BioWare veteran Mike Laidlaw has stated that he would likely quit the studio if he had been told that the Dragon Age franchise needed to transition from a single-player experience adopt a games as a service model.
Laidlaw made the comments on BlueSky in response to EA’s Andrew Wilson commenting the somewhat muted sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which the executive seemed to indicate was due to the fact it didn’t have live service elements.
Look, I’m not a fancy CEO guy, but if someone said to me ‘the key to this successful single-player IP’s success is to make it purely a multiplayer game. No, not a spin-off: fundamentally change the DNA of what people loved about the core game, to me, I’d probably, like, quit that job or something.
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Laidlaw departed BioWare back in October 2017 and is now fronting Yellow Brick Games, with his studio’s debut title, Eternal Strands, arriving in January 2025.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched in October 2024 for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S, but EA revealed last month that sales of the game and EA Sports FC 25 had underperformed.
[Source – Mike Laidlaw on BlueSky]
