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Nothing easy about writing those words? Nobody can even read a mass effect game.
It’s always the fucking suits.
When they got sold to ea, this was the only possible outcome anyway. Not sure if they sold out or ea did some corporate bullshit to force them to it, but they should have stayed away from ea if they wanted to keep making games.
They sold out to a private equity firm, who in turn sold them to EA.
In these lists of great things to remember Bioware for, people keep not including MDK2. It told an amazing story of a mad scientist, his janitor and robot dog, repelling an alien invasion and saving Earth. Deserves to be mentioned alongside their othet awesome games.
It’s just a shame they never made a 4th dragon age
Such a tragedy. Black Isle and Bioware were such a great combo in the late 90’s.
Just following the fate of Bethesda and Id: kiddos, your heros will die. So it goes.
CDPR hopefully will not make these same mistakes… or they already have.
Note too the shit stains that now own EA.
The Morons in Japan are trying to blame online piracy. Makes me wanna swallow some nails…
I really wish we could get another great Mass Effect game, but I knew not to get my hopes up. I played Andromeda, after all.
This will happen to Rockstar before GTA6 comes out. They can’t admit they don’t have a game.
What? Gta 6 is like next month
That means all BioWare games should become free now, because a closed studio can’t get the money? /s
Of course EA will have no problem getting money on their behalf, all while slashing the developers. If you waited for a call to legitimately pirate BioWare games, this is it.
Check out OpenRA: Combined Arms lol
I keep hearing that EA isn’t responsible for this, because BioWare games have gone to shit recently. Does anyone honestly believe that EA’s takeover, corporate culture, and demands on the studio didn’t contribute to the drop in quality?
EA and other corpos’ death grip doesn’t start at the end when it all falls apart. The death grip is there from the moment you sell.
Yeah, because EA gave Bioware a chance to bounce back, in fact multiple chances. You could say EA killed the Bioware of old which the talent leaving the studio, but the new Bioware could’ve bounced back. They had everything they needed to succeed. A credible studio name that people trusted and a bunch of beloved IPs that people would give a chance. They even had EA giving them more than one shot to not fail (which is more than most EA studios get) and also plenty of time to get it right. All Bioware had to do was put out a good game and they simply couldn’t.
So let me ask in reverse. Let’s say Bioware was indepedent. What would Bioware have to fuck up for you to say its their fault for going under? Because to me they ticked all those boxes already. Had it been any other studio they’d already be dead and forgotten.
EA kept pushing them to MMOs despite them being a single player RPG company. I definitely think they dropped the ball too, but had they been put on DA4 right after inquisition and kept it going to completion I don’t think they’d’ve flopped like that
I think you might be using the wrong word here. EA never pushed Bioware to make MMOs. Bioware made one MMO, SWTOR, and that was a financial success. As far as I know no other Bioware game had been an MMO after EA bought them. Where Bioware struggled was with making live-service multiplayer games and there’s some argument that the unrealistic revenue expectations from EA forced Bioware to go down that route but in the end it was Bioware who suggested, back in 2012, that Anthem would be a live-service style game. How Veilguard ended up going multiplayer I’m not familiar with, but even there Bioware could go back to the single player experience, which still flopped.
EA forced them to make a live service game that failed. Then they tried to make them make a live service Dragon Age game. They decided to change Veilguard back to single-player, but late enough in the development cycle that it impacted the final product.
Andromeda was a technical mess at launch, but the game itself was fine. It was the weakest in the series, but they tried new stuff with the spinoff and I appreciated the attempt.
The only game they made before that I truly disliked was Dragon Age II.
EA didn’t force them, Bioware pitched Anthem as a live-service style game from the get-go.
EA installed managers of the company who had backgrounds in Major League Gaming and EA’s mobile gaming division. THEN they pitched a live service game. Most of the remaining members of the old guard left within months of Anthem’s announcement.
There’s no clear date on when the Anthem pitch happened but it happened before EA appointed Bromberg as the CEO, which was in 2013. Anthem didn’t get officially announced until 2017. Unless you meant the nameless teaser they put out in 2014.
If you want to continue arguing this you going to have to personally name who that old guard was because I very much doubt they left within months in 2014.
Persued ‘live-service’ games, using game engines that don’t fit, constantly shifting direction of games in development, focusing on a generic streamlined cinematic experience then telling a good, character-driven story with impactful and controversial choices, use Denuvo, stop releasing modding tools, …
If an independent studio does this stuff… Then they should look for better managers.
The first games that felt off to me where DA2 and ME3, but I played through them, they were still enjoyable. DA:I was bland and boring, so I dropped it, after that I didn’t see a return to the studio that I remembered.
I do hope that was a deliberate jab at Bungie. Because that’s exactly what Bungie did when they were independent and the reason they got bought out by Sony was because they were spiraling into their demise. Even now I think if Bungie goes under the blame lies with Bungie and not Sony. With that in mind I think it would be illogical to see two different studios go down the same path and then blame one studio but excuse the other studio.
I don’t get your point…
My point is that if Bioware did that when independent, they where to blame. But they weren’t independent when they did that.
Your point is that Bungie did that, when independent… So? Are people not blaming Bungie for doing live-services? If they don’t then they should! And if they do, then I don’t see the inconsistency.
From my POV, no games of Bungie had any interest. I guess Halo found some appeal to some, but this whole Destiny stuff… Maybe it was successful because of the novelty at that time. But I had no interest it that…
Okay, so without being what would Bioware have to do for you to blame Bioware for being shut down?
Okay, so without being what would Bioware have to do for you to blame Bioware for being shut down?
Now I have trouble parsing your question.
Didn’t I just answer that?
If BioWare would be independent, or maybe under a hypothetical ‘good guy EA’, and produced bad, bland, uninspired games, or dig themselves into one massive, feature-creep game, which eats all their money, but never releases, then I would blame them. So, if their management sucks. BioWare had enough money to find and hire good designers, writers, artists and programmers. If they suddenly start creating niche games, without broad appeal, that would be fine to, in my book.
Trying desperately to appeal to a broad demographic, instead of playing to their strength, and their established fanbase, is what makes bland games.
Under EA what would Bioware have to do for you to say “yeah, Bioware is at fault here”? Because my argument is that EA gave Bioware all the chances to succeed and despite getting all the chances they still couldn’t succeed.
And I never said EA is the good guy here. EA is not the good guy. But being an asshole company doesn’t instantly mean you’re to blame for everything.
I’m assuming it was a deliberate jab at how Bioware have been handled because that’s exactly what they did
Ah, they edited their comment as I was writing up mine. What they wrote before was exactly what Bungie did when they were independent. And if they did exactly the same things why would be assume EA killed Bioware but Bungie get them in their dire state on their own? Even with what the other person now changed the question stays the same. Why should we assume EA made them do those things instead of considering the possibility that they chose to do those things on their own? We have an example of a company making those same decisions all on their own and I think the relationship between EA and Bioware (especially when compared to some other studios like Visceral) EA did put some trust and autonomy into Bioware. I just don’t see how it’s inconceivable that Bioware could make those bad decisions on their own.
BioWare itself was a corporation, and that’s the problem. It ruined itself just as much as EA ruined it.
An outcome like this is inevitable when your goal is infinitely compounding returns on investments.
We should just go after all the money of the people who sell the studios. Everyone always forgets that for every game studio Equity Almighty destroys there’s a former owner sitting on a fat pile of cash that a whole group of people worked together to build, 120% tax on all assets of the assholes who traded a cool company for a pile of cash from the most evil people in the world.
We used to hate the sellouts for being sellouts. Now they just aren’t talked about, like selling out is inevitable and in many ways the whole point.
Agree with everything you have to say. We have become far too tolerant on bad behaving peers. Now they get called innovative and lots allude to be like them. It’s the new fame. Few people get rich in a conscientious way.
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And do not pretend that they didn’t told you that it’s wokeness that killed the modern game industry! /s
American. Modern American game-industry. Which sadly is the majority.
Eh. Bioware died a long time ago.
Alternate headline:
“The reanimated corpse of your loved one is now at peace.”
Right. Sucks for the people working there, but the BioWare we miss was already gone, so it doesn’t hurt that much.
Yeah when EA purchased them.
I’d argue slightly before. EA purchased them about the same time Mass Effect came out, which means they didn’t play a part in development. I would say Mass Effect was the beginning of the end for them. Yeah, it was great, but it was the game where they started dumbing things down and moving away from the CRPG into bland action games. Mass Effect was the start of the path towards Anthem and then trying to make Dragon Age into a multiplayer live-service thing, which ended up as Veilguard.
Mass Effect 1 & 2 were great though…
Oddly enough, of their top 10 best selling games, Mass Effect was the lowest, and newer games were better selling. So sales figures say otherwise. Dumbing things down is bad for one audience, but good for another.
https://gamerant.com/highest-selling-games-developed-bioware-ranked-how-much-sold/
I wonder how much this is because of dumbing down, and how much it is because the market got larger. For example in the year 2002, The Sims was the highest selling game of all time, at ~6 million copies.
At the time, the perception of video games was still a hobby of sweaty nerds. Some years later the Wii launched, and it became really popular as a family console. It had some sports games, and I think it did a lot to get a foothold on a more general market. Games weren’t just for sweaty nerds anymore. Although even then, a lot of people didn’t play games.
Then at some point the marketing shifted. Games had broader stories, they tried for more mass-market appeal by selling cinematic experiences and whatnot (remember the awful QTE era of like the late-2000s early 2010s?)
At that point, I think gaming in general had broadened its appeal. A lot of people had consoles, PC hardware wasn’t prohibitively expensive, etc.
I don’t doubt that dumbing down games has had an effect, by making things simpler and flattening the learning curve you make it more accessible. That’s a given. But I also think gaming becoming a more generally accessible and socially acceptable past time was a big contributor.
Once smart phones came along the mobile game market exploded, and I think that’s still the biggest market segment, though it’s moved on from its original simple puzzle games into bigger experiences, some that even translate decently well over to other mediums.
ThatsTheJoke.jpg
Yeah, but now we miss out on playing a rushed mass effect game and getting to complain about it not measuring up for a couple weeks. Now I have to find something new to do in August 2027
It has been a long time since I bought an EA game, yeah. Bioware was their only developer that I cared for.
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