Dragon Age: The Veilguard Triumphs at 2025 Gayming Awards, Celebrated for Inclusivity and Storytelling

BioWare’s latest action-RPG, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, has emerged as a major winner at the 2025 Gayming Awards, securing the coveted Game of the Year title. The game also received accolades for Best LGBTQ+ Character for its protagonist, Rook, and Best LGBTQ+ Voice Actor of the Year for Erika Ishii’s portrayal of the character. These wins underscore the game’s significant impact on representation and storytelling within the gaming industry.

The fifth annual Gayming Awards, founded by Robin Gray of Gayming magazine, is a prestigious event dedicated to celebrating LGBTQ+ themes, characters, and developers in video games. The awards ceremony, held in West Hollywood and hosted by content creators DEERE and Milady Confetti, also serves as a fundraiser for the Gayming Foundation. This charity is committed to “uplift[ing] and empower[ing] LGBTQ+ games workers and fans to effect change, celebrate inclusivity, and drive forward representation in games,” as stated by Checkpoint Gaming.

Robin Gray emphasized the importance of this year’s winners, noting, “This year’s winners represent a wonderfully diverse group of people, all of whom are working to make our industry better in their own way. Whether that’s creating games with storylines and characters that represent us, creating communities and holding space for LGBTQ+ people to be themselves, or by changing the industry piece by piece to be more inclusive.” The ceremony, which announced its winners on July 10, 2025, was streamed on World of Wonder’s WOW Presents Plus, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz.

Beyond its triumphs at the Gayming Awards, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released on October 31, 2024, for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, has garnered generally favorable reviews from critics. On Metacritic, the game holds scores of 82/100 for PS5, 76/100 for PC, and 85/100 for Xbox Series X/S. It also achieved a 71% recommendation rate on OpenCritic. Critics particularly lauded its inclusive character creator and robust representation of transgender and non-binary characters, with IGN praising its “body diversity” and Sports Illustrated highlighting its “right way” of handling gender identity. Despite facing some review bombing, the game maintained a “mostly positive” rating on Steam, where reviews require gameplay, indicating genuine player satisfaction.

The game’s critical success extends to numerous other accolades. It won the Outstanding Video Game award at the 36th GLAAD Media Awards in 2025 and secured Cinelinx awards for Game of the Year 2024, Best Game Direction, and Best Narrative. The Veilguard was also nominated for Ultimate Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards and received 10 nominations, including Game of the Year, at the 5th Canadian Game Awards. It featured prominently on several publications’ year-end lists for 2024, ranking 1st on Time‘s list, 4th on Associated Press‘, and 3rd on GamesRadar+‘, which also named it the Best RPG of 2024.

Commercially, The Veilguard saw a strong launch, topping Steam’s global top sellers chart and achieving over 85,000 concurrent players during its opening weekend. This set a new record for BioWare’s Steam player count and surpassed the peak concurrent players of any previous single-player EA game, including the Star Wars Jedi titles. It debuted at No. 7 on the UK sales chart and No. 6 in the US. However, despite this initial success, EA announced in January 2025 that the game had “engaged” 1.5 million players by December 31, 2024, falling short of their internal expectation of 3 million. This led to speculation from EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson that single-player games might need to reach “beyond the core audience” with “shared-world features and deeper engagement.”

The game’s journey to release was notably protracted, undergoing a lengthy development cycle since 2015 that included a pivot from a live-service model back to a single-player experience. Despite these challenges and subsequent post-launch studio restructuring that saw active development end in January 2025 with no planned DLC, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has carved out a significant place in the franchise’s history, particularly for its commitment to diverse representation and compelling narrative design.