EA is shutting down BioWare
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
Going forward, I hope Bioware's people land great new jobs, and here's hoping some of their IP gets picked up by other studios. Mass Effect in particular is a fantastic creation that a lot of people would love to spend more time in.
I think 2 decades is a bit generous considering the state of Bioware recently. When was their latest game that was well-received? Dragon Age Inquisition?
Mainly because ME3's original ending was tied to you grinding in multiplayer to reach the single player goals. No thank you.
And Dragon Age 2 was more famous for copy/paste dungeons than for the actual game.
So... i just stopped looking at "the new Bioware".
The last two games listed are "Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)", which was incredibly popular, "Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024)" which seems to have been widely panned, so still hitting 50/50 at the end of it?
Going back further, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was unpopular with fans but found a fairly solid cult following, and "Dragon Age: Inquisition" is the one you mentioned as well-received, so still batting 50/50
Admittedly, "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" is more of a well-done cash grab, and even Mass Effect 3 was a bit controversial on release due to the bad ending (but I think it's agreed the rest of the game was solid?)
Given EA bought them in 2007, it's clear they released some solid games even years after being acquired
on the flip side, studio owners, through no effort of their own, have been practically gifted a solution (hint: it's two letters) to nearly all of the problems relating to their actual risks, which are all focused on production and the nimbleness to respond to player feedback. the real question is whether or not EA still has distribution channels that no one else has.
It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.
Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.
Having to ship AAA games isn’t the problem. The problem is the incessant need to only focus on live service games so that they can milk their consumer left and right. Studio executives come in with unrealistic sales expectations, which then means you can only try and make games that have a live service component to generate a constant revenue stream, which then means you can’t make good games anymore. You’re either making games that are similar to other and get lost in the crowd or are forced to differentiate by promising something that’s never done before, which adds scope, risk and budget to the game.
If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.
Also, look at the BioWare successes and failures. They did well when they did single player games, failed when they ventured into live service.
Yes, but it's also rational for founders to sell a successful small studio when they can.
NWN being one of the first games to use master server and key technologies at scale was motivated to detect publisher royalty theft by tracking sold copies (and indeed an Atari division in Europe tried selling copies of NWN with copied keys) not just traditional piracy because the company had first hand experience with it.
Black Isle, an interplay first party studio made Infinity Engine spin off games which gets people confused here.
Source: Ex Bioware
Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles
This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.
ETA: That was a bit terse. My point was simply that it's more difficult to do institutional knowledge transfer when turnover is high, which may be a problem in the games industry.
you see the homeruns and not the dross, but there is a lot of stuff that is shit
1 - 2017 they cut from 500 -> ~350
2 - 2023 went from 350 -> 200 that included a bunch of very senior people including the OG writer of Baldur's gate Lukas Kristjanson
3 - Early '24 cut down to 100 skeleton crew as the writing on the wall for DA Veilguard sales materialized (sold about 1.5m vs 3m projected)
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)
it had many issues, but the writing was still great, the story compelling, and the characters human. so people were disappointed that it didn't match or exceed DA1, but it was still a good game because of the writing, and people grew to appreciate it.
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
They kinda still around w/ BF & FIFA\Madden which is a Money-printing machine. I never understood this, I just wanted NHL back on the PC. Yeah, there is 2004 w/ the Rebuild mod & an OSS port which I didn't checked out. +There Games up 2 '07 4 the PC, but it seems like the Community decided that '04's the ticket.
I always wanted a 'Bloodbowl'/Speedball Hockey title which is a crossover w/ Figure Skating... Where the Figure Skating gurls are like Bayonetta/Rayne & she posseses certain kind of superpowers while the Males are all like WH40k Space Marines & the Goalie is her FemDom Slave or smh? xD Anyhow... 2 bad I can't into gfx.
AAA games in general have been having massive problems with over-management, where you have hundreds of stakeholders for a game. The second there is proven money in a franchise, massive structures of managers start to meddle in everything, demand day and date release promises, and get involved in everything from creative direction to engineering to resourcing. You end up with thousands of people in the credits for games made by a team of 100 artists and programmers.
The same thing has been happening to big budget movies and prestige TV shows, to the point that everything becomes this sort of neoliberal corporate soup that reflects the culture of the company. Game studios become victims of their own success. In the same way enterprise software becomes consultant feature slop soup, media becomes focus grouped appeals-to-no-one ultra high production value shovelware.
Creative studios stop producing art or meaningful experiences and start producing content.
They basically used to make amazing games in the 2000s and never quite lived up to that reputation again. Whether the acquisition by EA was the cause or the symptom of the decline, I don't know.
Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.
[1] - https://blog.bioware.com/2022/07/15/bioware-developer-story-...
Both are more recent than the BioWare examples, and of course more recent than Stardew Valley, which is more in line with the Harvest Moon genre.
They do, but only as a means for controlling the people they rule over. The House of Saud, when outside Saudi Arabia, drink alchohol, wear revealing clothing, and make use of the sex industry.
>romancing characters of the same gender You mean yuri action? Otherwise, nobody wants that. And yes. I'm talking solely out of a feminine perspective here.^^
Otherwise, I once was teh mastermind behind a FemDom/FLR Megamod 4 Sims 3. To unite them all was a kinda scummy affair but the monies that stuff generated, man... Yes, it was/is common 4 The Sims mods 2 be paywalled.
Dice acquired the Desert Combat studio, and the same people made BF2.
After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.
I'd place it around the start of ME2.
Veilguard was my favority gameplay wise, but the writing... well you know.
By the time of the next Dragon Age game, EA was deep in making decisions.
Veilguard was very poorly marketed to appeal to a neoliberal crowd as if the characters and identity was the primary draw rather than the core story themes (Wizards v Templars, Societal Order vs Individual Freedom, the capacity for evil and corruption of either side) and the world which was fascinating. I love me some inclusion and well crafted characters, but the focus on it to the exclusion of all else as a queer person it gave me the same ick as a corporate float at a pride parade.
Sad, even though BioWare was dead already.
Art
They're still around, making good shit elsewhere. ChatGPT often helps me track down some of the people behind my favorite games and check out their later work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cxz4a/eas_graveyar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610092047/https://old.reddi...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcf.preview.re...
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.
(But purchased by EA obviously)
- Talos Principle 2
- Expedition 33
- KCD2
- Anything by Arcane
- Anything by CDPR
- 007 Last light / Hitman
- Blue Prince
Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!
Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem
I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.
(In no certain order)
- Baldur's Gate
- Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
- Neverwinter Nights
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Jade Empire
- Mass Effect
- Mass Effect 2
- Mass Effect 3
- MDK2
- Dragon Age Origins
- Dragon Age II
- Dragon Age: Inquisition
So consider backing there. There may have been 20 companies trying to make 20 games, All in startup mode.
Now two or three of those succeed ed.. which means the management and team chemistry and creativity all worked really well. And the team members will have them mistaken impression that it's that easy.
But then some people leave some people ad in the next games, sure, they may have a better foundation than some other team situations at others, but it's going to gradually regress to the mean
It kinda works for those who get that one long term hit and after that can just deliver not much else...
There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.
"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."
I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.
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 like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep
EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.
- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.
- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.
For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.
Even in the good times their ability to create (and hide) black holes was prodigious.
BioWare, in the last 12 years, has released: Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Veilguard, and Anthem.
It's still painful to see the studio go away, but I sadly agree.
A what now?
They were purchased decades ago
Never thought that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would shutdown the company that created so many childhood memories.
The last impressive things they shipped were Mass Effect and DA:O. That was 19 and 17 years ago.
Everything since has been trend-chasing and running on creative fumes.
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.
You can make a complete masterpiece, and build it cheaply - but there's no guarantee you can do it again.
That's why there was such a massive push towards live service games and MMOs, or microtransactions - it's quite literally the only way to make one creative effort valuable 1 year post release.
I don't envy folks who make games for a living and I also don't envy the founders and leadership, it just seems do brutally difficult to do well.
Unless you're Valve, in which case you sell companion cube plushies until the end of time.
The staying power it's had is unbelievable. Right place, right time, I guess!
Speaking of Andromeda, I still rewatch videogamedunkey's hilarious review of it titled Mess Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs
I wish I had never seen the new ME teaser / trailer [1] out 5 years ago.
RIP to an amazing creative group
i can assure you that the original amazing group has been gone for over a decade. modern bioware has only been good at dragging someone else's legacy through the mud.
kotor was one of the first interactive media franchises to showcase that era in the Star Wars universe, and it was an era that's radically different than anything in the movies.
bg3 is a typical DnD setting + sex + lovecraftian elements and flayers sitting in for beholders to spice it up; and they were only there because during dev-time lovecraft was a huge gaming trend.
don't get me wrong; I love both of them, but the BG3 story was the one that ended up feeling like -- for me -- something that would have been a modpack for Neverwinter Nights.
I guess you have the edition of Deities and Demigods where they were cut...
To me at least, somehow KOTOR and KOTOR 2 made me care more about the characters and story than BG3.
BG3 has better systems and combat and gear and such, but for many the worldbuilding, story, quests and such of KOTOR have yet to be beaten. Bastia Shan, Carth Onasi, Visas Marr, HK47.
The story of Revan and its twists.
Perhaps its just nostalgia and many KOTOR fans having been at an earlier age when they played those Bioware games compared to DOS 2 and BG3 though. Maybe people who were teenagers playing Larian games feel as attached to the characters and story as those of us who were teens in KOTOR's heyday did.
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long. Sad to see them go but only because they should have been way better
RIP to one of the best game studios.
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.
I find it funny (and interesting at the same time) that the US, despite its massive ressources, never managed to replicate Hollywood's success in video games
And i'm not talking just about commercial success (they already pale in comparison), i'm taling about the blockbusters, the masterpieces, the things that combine technical prowess, artistic ambition and global cultural influence
Where is the Hollywood of video games?
Why was Elden Ring made in Japan?
It's similar with anime vs cartoons, there are some deep existential stakes at play for the west
Apart from whatever the hell happened with Bungie's many changes of ownership, I can't think of many beloved franchises that have been successfully transitioned to new ownership...
(Outside of games, Expedia was a spin out that got an odd mix of old MSN IP.)
I can't help but read that in the Critical Drinker's voice.
Sounds like a horrible existence. Might as well listen to a cheese grater.
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.
Anyway - good riddance.
[0]: https://www.autismparentingmagazine.com/autism-and-sarcasm/
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!
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.
I guess in a way it was unavoidable. Still sad though.
I miss many great companies of the 1990s.
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.
ConcernedApe likely made enough for one person to FIRE on so he’s probably fine and maybe haunted chocolatier even does get finished one day.
Bad decisions, mismanagement, greed.
Tho not the first aquisition I see nose-diving due to incompetent management.
people loved Dragon Age. people craved more Dragon Age for a decade. Inquisition was not perfect, but some parts were great, and it did establish the plot for what could've been an amazing sequel. they only needed to give people more of the thing we wanted.
Veilguard was so irredeemably fucking bad that it seemed like deliberate sabotage. I can't, for the life of me, understand the folly of writers treating the audience of the franchises they inherit with extreme contempt. it happens again, and again, and again. franchise after franchise gets exhumed to have its corpse violated and reimagined into Marvelesque YA slop for the nonexistent "modern audience". they inevitably and predictably bomb, and the people responsible still get hired to do the exact same fucking thing again to other beloved franchises.
it's all so fucking tiresome.
Such as shame.
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?
The thing is, customers/players generally don’t care. Just look at the annual incremental releases of games that continue to sell well. Sure, there is also a cohort of players who love the indie scene for its more grassroots or authentic approach to games. Both sides of that player spectrum would ultimately be happy with more quality content, but I agree with you that perhaps one side may be more averse to AI “assisted” game development.
I think the nuance here is for a fan of indie games, how much of the artwork has to be hand generated? What if the artist uses AI to help speed up tedious work like additional frames or animation? What the game is entirely coded in AI but hand drawn (or vice versa).
Users hate AI-generated assets, and justifiably so because they're often really terrible, and they take work away from artists. Regarding LLMs, users are far less passionate unless the project has clearly been slopped out as a quick-and-dirty vibecoded app.
I can sympathise why many hate gen AI for the jobs it’s taken (and there is nuance here because often it’s not gen ai - it’s cost cutting or misaligned expectations from executives) but I feel like the craftsman who embraces the tool can create more value for the world than the craftsman who does not.
In any case, there will be a market for 100% human made art, media, and games -I’m just not sure we should obsess with enforcing (and gatekeeping), if someone who is a mediocre artist with a great game idea wants to make a game and use AI to accelerate themselves to deliver a better product for the world then that’s great.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
lol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?
They dumped the coolest name ever because of the legal department. Sad!
From the same post-mortem video:
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...
No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
Au contraire! Unreal Tournament with the Strangelove mod and no extras (e.g., just the puny Yellow Jacket gun) was some quality flying.
Seems like that description fits a whole lot of modern (read: everything from the past decade) games. And some of those even enjoy success and are beloved by many players for some reason, like Breath of the Wild.
Then they release Pharaoh TW that nobody wanted, Shogun TW "remaster" that everyone hates, and failed in many other ways.
At this point, I hope Sega puts them out of their misery. I can't stand another decade of Warhammer without any proper historical titles.