On Halloween 2024, Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched to a quick flash of attention on Steam. For a few hours, BioWare’s long-delayed fantasy RPG topped sales charts. That short-lived momentum was all it took for Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier to mock the game’s critics with a snide post on social media.
A post on X from Bloomberg Games Journalist Jason Schreier mocking gamers about Dragon Age: The Veilguard right before the game collapsed and flopped – Jason Schreier on X
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“Go woke, go bro— err, top the charts,” he said.
The jab was aimed squarely at players who had raised red flags about the game’s direction—players who were ridiculed for daring to question whether a beloved franchise had abandoned its roots in favor of trend-chasing aesthetics and cultural posturing.
Just months later, Veilguard had become one of the most disastrous releases in modern gaming history. EA quietly pushed the game into steep discounts. The player base collapsed. Layoffs hit BioWare. The game’s director resigned. And now, in an extraordinary about-face, Jason Schreier has published a lengthy article calling the game a “debacle.”
A screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
But in nearly 3,000 words of postmortem analysis, there’s one thing Schreier never mentions: the exact criticism he once mocked. The overwhelming fan backlash to the game’s identity-driven presentation, tone, and marketing.
A Masterclass in Avoidance
Schreier’s article, “Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio,” is thorough in many respects. He documents the tortured development process, from live-service pivots to management infighting to budgetary strain. And there’s no doubt that BioWare faced immense pressure from EA to produce a commercial hit.
But what’s most striking is what the article leaves out.
A screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
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Not once does Schreier acknowledge the widespread and immediate backlash from longtime fans who felt the game’s tone and character design had abandoned the mature fantasy roots of the series. The first trailer for Veilguard was lambasted across social media for its Fortnite-like aesthetic, over-the-top quippy dialogue, and an ensemble of characters that many felt looked like a diversity initiative rather than a cast grounded in the world’s lore.
Even internal testers reportedly flagged the snarky tone as a concern. BioWare leadership scrambled late in development to rewrite portions of the script to avoid comparisons to notable flop Forspoken, but by then the damage was done. The tonal inconsistency became yet another issue on top of already fractured gameplay and storytelling.
A screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
Schreier mentions the dialogue rewrite, sure—but never connects it to the cultural criticism that had engulfed the game’s reception. Instead, the article portrays the failure as a purely logistical issue: leadership turnover, multiplayer confusion, marketing errors, and an aggressive deadline.
All true—but glaringly incomplete.
Gamers Were Right. Media Mocked Them Anyway.
When Veilguard was revealed, players spoke up. They said this wasn’t Dragon Age. They said the trailer looked like a parody. They pointed out that the dark, complex world BioWare had once built now felt like it had been scrubbed down for modern sensibilities. And they were right.
The pointed to the ability to add top surgery scars in the character creator and the game’s seeming obsession with gender politics as massive red flags, proof that this long awaited title had gone off the rails and embraced the myth of the modern audience.
A screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
But instead of listening, industry reporters like Schreier chose to dunk on them in real time—only to quietly pivot months later when the numbers collapsed and the pink slips hit inboxes.
That’s the real issue here. It’s not just that Veilguard failed. It’s that the people paid to cover this industry fairly have consistently dismissed legitimate fan feedback—especially when that feedback challenges the prevailing ideological narratives of the entertainment press.
What Schreier Got Right—and What He Didn’t
To be fair, Schreier’s piece contains some useful reporting. The article reveals the chaos behind the scenes at BioWare, the strain between the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams, and the top-down mismanagement that led to decision after decision being overturned mid-development.
These insights matter, but they aren’t the whole story. They don’t explain why players turned away in droves.
A screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
A 10-year franchise gap doesn’t explain it. A late pivot to single-player doesn’t explain it. Even clunky combat doesn’t fully explain it.
What does explain it—at least in part—is that the heart of the franchise had been ripped out and replaced with something that looked and sounded like it was written for a TikTok demographic, rather than the fantasy fans who built BioWare’s reputation to begin with.
And not only is that angle ignored—it’s the only angle Schreier won’t touch.
The Fallout Continues
Today, BioWare is a shell of what it once was. EA has restructured the studio, relabeled its headquarters, and left only a small bare bones group to work on the next Mass Effect. The future is uncertain, and fans are rightly skeptical.
Jason Schreier, meanwhile, has pivoted from mocking the game’s critics to chronicling its collapse—without a single note of self-reflection.
Key art for Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), BioWare
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. When the warning signs are clear, legacy media mocks the fans. When the house burns down, they write about the fire—but never about the spark that lit it.
How do you feel about Jason Schreier’s take on Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
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They will never learn. They will never tell the truth.
Jason Schreier is a woke propagandist. He was a Kotaku writer during the early days of GamerGate and was trying to demonise games he didn’t like while defending microtransactions.
[…] Fonte: That Park Place […]
Jason Schreier being the schmuck that he is. He will keep grifting and ignoring the problem.
That weakling player profile picture, third pic down looks exactly like a guy a saw working at target. Fake horns, disenfranchised expression, and all! Wrapped in an ill fitted red T shirt.
[…] One of life’s great pleasures is watching a smug creep admitting he was wrong, even if he tries to disguise it to save face. One such incident happened today, courtesy of Jason Schreier. Schreier is a games journalist currently working for Bloomberg who co-hosts a podcast called Triple Click; he used to write for Kotaku, and he’s published three books on the video game industry. With a résumé like that, you can probably guess what his opinion of gamers is, and last year, he was happy to share it. BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard was mocked for being insanely woke before it was released, with some ram monster going on for ages about how it was “non-binary,” another character demonstrating how to atone for misgendering someone, and in-game options suggesting you examine “the benefits of a multicultural background,” plus character customization features like “top surgery scars.” Remember, Dragon Age: The Veilguard takes place in a high fantasy world, not San Francisco in the 2020s, so this stuff is about as natural as tofu at a fast food joint. Upon its release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard netted 58,958 concurrent players on Steam on its opening day (which was Halloween) and reached 89,418 that Sunday, which wasn’t bad, though not what BioWare was expecting. And Jason Schreier was on X, gloating to gamers who didn’t want identity politics in their fantasy game and said familiar phrases like “Go woke, go broke” (image courtesy of That Park Place): […]
You remember when the democrats spend 20 million on a meeting in a luxury hotel, to find out, how they can reach young men again?
That’s exactly how I imagine the meeting went. A lot of beating arround the bush and during the whole meeting they carefully avoided to even once address the real reasons, young men don’t vote democrats anymore.
That’s just how the left is. They can’t talk about the elephant in the room, because their whole existence revolves around making the world believe there is no elephant. So, when the elephant it’s breaking stuff in the room, they have to make up the most ridiculous and stupid reasons, for why that stuff is breaking.