alt Hacker NewsEA is shutting down BioWare
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Why is anyone surprised in the least? I've been boycotting EA totally since 2012 or 2013, I don't even remember now, and they had a whole ass graveyard of dead studios even back then, on top of other immoral shit and lies they produced. People rightfully blame corpos like Actiblizzard or Ubisoft, but EA was always in a league of their own.
BioWare shutting down is sad, but it’s really a classic ship of theseus situation.
There are a handful of notables still there but the majority of the teams that made the classic Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect disappeared a long time ago through natural turnover and a couple of brutal rounds of layoffs.
The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.
One of the notable ways BioWare pushed the industry forward was the ability for the player to initiate a romance storyline with any one of a variety of in game characters. That often included the option of romancing characters of the same gender. I point this out because the Saudi Investment Fund bought EA a couple months back and they obviously have very strong opinions on those sorts of relationships. Are these two connected? I don't know, there are plenty of other potential reasons to close a studio, so probably not. But these are now the sort of questions we have to ask ourselves anytime EA makes a decision like this.
I am still extremely bitter about how BioWare, in my opinion, ruined the dragon age franchise. While not "truly" turn based, dragon age origins and dragon age 2 had the spirit of it, and felt like a party-based tactical RPG. Then out of nowhere, the studio decided to abandon that with inquisition and turn it into an action/adventure style of game. I had never really been so bitterly disappointed with a game release.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
The news that Bioware is being shut down hurts more than similar news for other studios. I knew Ray and Greg from university and played ADnD and various Avalon Hill war games with them in the 80s. Ah the days and nights spent on the 6th floor of the UofA Administrative Services building. They were passionate guys who built ground breaking games (Ok, so some of them were rough…) and created an amazing team.
I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.
Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!
The makers of Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins.
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
It's not like no one saw this coming. Here's a comic from nine years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
Talent in western game studios just can't shake the startup mode. Try get a hit, try to get bought, cash out, run away.
Blizzard seemed to defy the stereotype but it died a long time ago, it's just a husk.
The contrast with japanese game studios is impressive.
The current commercial game studio apocalypse is tragic for the disruption to jobs and lives but it was inevitable and, although painful, I think a necessary correction in terms of improving the health of gaming in the long run.
Around 2020 the industry quickly added around 35% more jobs based on three big things. 1) A COVID-shutdown driven demand bubble, 2) PE capital chasing inflated Live Service gaming profit projections and, 3) Speculative land-grab industry roll-ups by Embracer and Microsoft. These triggers were all either temporary, illusory or chasing trends which are net negative for the gaming. Those inflated jobs weren't justified by organic growth and shouldn't have been created in the first place.
It's the new hot business model. Buy a very successful studio then liquidate it.
Could this be related to the war in the Gulf
One of my favorite game companies ever. But it had already been "shut down" in practice after the acquisition.
I am grateful they released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which was a sort of penance for Mass Effect Andromeda.
Speaking of Andromeda, I still rewatch videogamedunkey's hilarious review of it titled Mess Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs
As someone who spent so much time in the universe of Mass Effect / Dragon Age, this is hard. I am almost grieving. The latest games of those franchises (Andromeda and Veilguard) could not live up to the expectations. They deserved a better ending.
I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.
While we may be saying goodbye to BioWare, we can still enjoy the games through services like Good Old Games (GOG) who preserve the titles - BG1, BG2, KOTOR and more can certainly keep living on.
RIP to one of the best game studios.
> The company is also laying off around 400 staffers, Bloomberg reports, including around 50 at BioWare. The changes follow EA being taken private by an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal that closed in August.
Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.
You must gather your party before venturing forth
Sic transit gloria mundi.
I think that a lot of Bioware fans just had nostalgia though - their recent work doesn't seem to have been as well received as their franchise initiator games.
Hopefully this opens the door for EA to sell off the Mass Effect IP to a company that's interested in making something other than a live service game.
RIP Bioware. I was a designer at Pandemic early on before they joined forces. The last remnant of those times falls.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Damn, I have a buddy who works for them, he was working on the new Mass Effect. He just lost his mom very quickly a few months ago too.
He hosted a friend and I end of last year and gave us a tour of their offices in Vancouver. Hits close to home.
I had never played any Bioware games but after that trip it inspired me to finally get around to playing through the Dragon Age series, and I marathoned them all over the next few months. It wasn't hard to see the very steep decline in quality. Which is unfortunate cause they definitely had a lot of talent but were being sabotaged internally from executives jerking them around with trend chasing (for as bad as Veilguard was, it's surprising they cobbled something together that's at least somewhat cohesive when it was going back and forth between a single player and multiplayer game), as well as people being put in charge of major creative decisions that clearly had not earned that role.
I just hope they sell off the IP rather than letting it stagnate further. There are other game studios out there who could do a lot with it.
Honestly I bet Obsidian is next, and I'm not sure I'll mind. I still love them for the great games they've made in the past, and still I buy their new releases, but they haven't been able to pull off a compelling game since Pillars of Eternity 2. That was 8 years ago.
The good news is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard was made by, and for, modern audiences. The bad news is it sunk the company alongside Anthem.
Bioware has been dead for over a decade. What we have now has just been wearing its name. Honestly best to just let it go.
I gasped at the news but in retrospect, I'm not surprised... but as a huge Dragon Age fan, I had a bit of hope of a new Dragon Age game. This is a sad day.
May all of those developers go off to create their own IP and, in turn, get acquired by EA.
It's like the cluttered overgrown forest that periodicly burns down to create space for new life.
EA is like a landowner who does no maintenance but loves to buy things that have been maintained because they look so good.
Really loved Jade Empire and Mass Effect. But they had lost their touch quite some time ago. Not surprised this was coming
The EA I remember was Racing Destruction Set, Pinball Construction Set, great stuff, lots of freeform playtime. Did they continue releasing that kind of stuff? Yeah I haven't kept up.
I suspect the economics and 'shape' of the gaming industry to change over the next few years. Currently we're in this strange place with game dev where a large portion of software engineers (majority?) are using LLMs and AI coding tools, but for some reason the gaming industry (or at least it's customers) are vehemently anti-AI to the point studios have to put out statements about AI usage to assuage the mobs online.
This will change. The silent majority of customers will vote with their wallets once they realise they will get a) more games and b) better games - because the barrier to entry has been lowered, the timeframes, resource requirements reduced, more unique IP or novel games, etc. Yes, there will be more slop/shovelware - that's bound to happen - but we will also get vastly more great games as well if we allow the industry to embrace AI coding and generative AI for assets to assist creatives and developers.
It is sad that EA announced they are choosing not to continue development of the next ME game. I'm sure there are many fans of that franchise here, I know I sank a lot of hours into the series (and the online co-op mode from ME3).
Maybe EA sell off the IP to a studio who can lean into fully AI assisted game development. There's a chance we'll get something decent - and hey, it can't be as bad as Andromeda, right?
Bioware's long death began when it was acquired by EA.
Knights of the Old Republic will forever be one of my favorite games
RIP to an amazing creative group
Many great memories of KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. RIP
Their last really good game was Dragon Age: Origins. It is nice that they put the studio out of its misery.
This comes not long after Sony basically killed Bungie. Destiny 2 is "done", and Marathon has an extremely low player count and is in the process of dying.
Bioware hasn't released a good game in over a decade, and Anthem was a low point for the entire game industry imo
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. Sad to see them go but only because they should have been way better
Always played BioWare's games including Mass Effect.
Such as shame.
People kind of predicted this, didn't they?
I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.
I miss many great companies of the 1990s.
One of the few corps I applied for a job at that did not even reply. Also known for being a bit of a crappy employer as well even long before EA bought them. Many other studios was also out of line back then to be fair.
I see the acquisition by the Saudi government is going well.
They wrote on the flipboard: If GTA6 online next month... We'd better shut down the company
End of an era, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
I think its safe to say that its pure failed management from EA.
Bad decisions, mismanagement, greed.
Tho not the first aquisition I see nose-diving due to incompetent management.
"EA is shutting down" would be a much more pleasing headline to read.
Industry of Scam. Industry of Spy.
Scummy EA. They really ruin the industry. They kill all the good stuff and promote the crappy yearly FIFA crap.
good day for gamers, bioware has been dead for a decade so it can finally rest in peace.
As always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:
https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."