I don’t understand how what EA does isn’t just a straight up crime. There has to be some kind of checks and balances that prevent a corporation from buying another profitable corporation and making it unprofitable on purpose almost immediately every single time.
nah, their sports titles still print money and Battlefield is huge. This round of layoffs is exactly what was coming as they were going to laser focus on the things that print money like the sports titles, apex legends and battlefield. Everything else is going to get the shit end of the stick.
they have been trying to get into gaming and to diversify their business for years. Plus sports titles and battlefield+apex does actually make money. Why would they pull out when the thing they bought makes money?
While disruptive, and developers like Bioware getting shafted absolutely sucks, hopefully EA will sooner or later fuck off from the rest of the industry, and leave it to people who aren't quite as scummy.
I don't care if they rip off the idiots who play sports games these days, if they leave the rest of us alone.
EA unfortunately are not really that different from majority. All corporate sucks, EA has just been one of the first to show how much they suck in gaming world and the infamy stuck.
I personally haven't played it since Battlefield 3, which must have been what 15 years ago. But they keep making it and according to a search BF6 sold 7 million copies in 3 days which doesn't seem like dead to me. $420m in 3 days is really not dead no matter how you slice it.
yeah and they made their budget back in the first 3-4 days. And then the game kept being sold and now is roughly at 20m, so they made $1.2billion in revenue from one game. And that's just direct game sales. Add in the the money they make by selling in-game cosmetics.
Many people, especially those in charge, will judge a company by their last game or games. BioWare's last 3 games were Anthem, ME Andromeda and DA Veilguard.
I guess Mass Effect andromeda after they fixed the game. Everyone hated on it, because of the bugs. It overshadowed everything. No one was actually talking about how the game was in general.
I am the guy, who is willing to look past bugs. I played Red Orchestra 2 on launch day.
It was one of the most buggiest games I have played at that time, but when the game worked, like it was supposed to, nothing comes close to it. The intensity, the atmosphere, everything was just amazing.
I played Andromeda years after it came out with zero expectations and it was still kinda buggy but I just didn't like it. The moment-to-moment writing was just so far below the standards of the trilogy and the story beats never impressed me. Even the visuals look uglier than ME3 outside of a few moments where the lighting effects look cool (this one I can blame on EA forcing Bioware to use the Frostbite engine).
I can overlook bugs too, I played Cyberpunk on release and finished it within a couple weeks of it coming out and despite the bugs I thought it was a really good game that could be great with some polish (no pun intended) and tweaks to the skill tree.
It was one of the first games to be thrown under the bus by undeserved rage campaigning against ”Wokism”.
I played it at launch and while it would have been better to get polished a month longer, it was just fine, a couple of patches and the facial animations were fixed as well.
Kotaku leaked that EA didn’t give them that month because they needed sales for their quarterly report.
Out of those two major issues EA had complete power over the release date. If they’d prioritized maximum sales and a good release they’d let them push the release date back a month and the 8/10 reviews likely would have been enough to counter the hype train against woke companions.
It’s all on EA in my book. The game is fine and would have been great with the planned DLC content.
The management were/are completely out of touch with anything that isn’t a new touchup of a sports game.
Andromeda and Veilguard were decent games, both sitting somewhere in the range of a 7/10 Metacritic score, they just weren’t the exceptional games that BioWare was known for.
That is not correct. Both Anthem and Andromeda were the fruits of the failure but not the initial failure.
EA pushed Bioware to push out games in very quick succession. When DAO was a hit EA pushed Bioware to develop a game for the 2011, even though it was less than 2 years of dev time after DAO's DLC. Inquisition wasn't supposed to be the third game it was supposed to be the second game. But DA2 got made because EA wanted a financial boost.
They also pushed to develop ME3 in 2 years.
Between 2007 and 2013 Bioware released 6 games. Two whole trilogies. Each one with dozens of hours of gameplay. And you could see how each game had issues because they didn't get enough time to fix them.
This is what pushed Bioware into failure. It gave both Bioware and EA the false sense that at the last moment they will make a game great no matter what.
but the writing is not an isolated process. The writing failure is all part of the bigger issue. The writers don't just get to write whatever they want so that it would be put into game straight away. Whatever they wrote would have to be read by many people and approved by several people. Not just Bioware people but EA people for sure. That's how corporate works.
And it's not like ALL the writing is bad, but the output of several writers clearly wasn't up to the task like Trick Weekes. Whatever happened to them in between has had a negative consequence on their writing, or they lost whoever was doing the editorial work for them.
All that was written, especially for the fully voiced conversations and cutscenes would have had to go through an approval process. This means multiple people either failed to notice how bad it is, which I somehow doubt or there was another reason or reasons why the writing was approved despite the drop in quality.
It could have been another case of toxic positivity, which wouldn't surprise me considering how Bioware seemed to have bent over backwards to do certain things and why so many dialogues in DAV feel like they were written in the presence of HR. If no one was allowed to criticise the writing done even when it was clearly bad because of WHO the writer was then the result really is not a surprise.
Plus, the issue with writing didn't start with Andromeda. The ending to ME3 proves that they had an issue already and their belief in the "bioware magic" clearly was not correct.
it simply took many more people leaving over the years for the issue to come to the front.
The problem with andromeda is certainly not the game engine. Mass effect 1 is extremely janky and still more core compelling. All the best talent left the company.
Frostbite is a great engine when given time to learn it and develop the parts that weren’t available. It’s well known they had issues but I agree, Andromeda runs great and easily has the best gameplay of the mass effect games.
When they pushed it out early they got a lot of flak for facial animations, it was fixed pretty quickly in the second or third patch but together with the antiwokeism hype train it gave enough bad press to tank the sales.
Patrick Söderlund literally gave an open directive that ALL IN HOUSE GAMES MUST BE DEVELOPED USING FROSTBITE. They MIGHT have chosen it themselves at one point, but it WAS forced on them, and they were shooting themselves in the foot. Theare are a LOT of issues with Andromeda, Anthem, even DA:I, but we'll never know how many of those could have been avoided/lessened, if they didn't have to fucking rewrite the SAVE SYSTEM for every single game because frostbite didn't even natively support that! Not to mention the dialogue system and everything else. Anthem is the result of stupid exec decisions, not in last place the fact that they decided to push it onto the Bioware B team who has never developed something like that before, them generating a fake trailer for E3, generating fake playable builds for the execs, etc.
For real. Plus they spent a decade hinting at a KOTOR remake that never went anywhere(probably because they couldn't figure out how to mess up Star Wars any worse than Disney did).
Corporations have been running this way for decades and it's not going to change. I mean, read up about Red Lobster and how they were purchased, saddled with debt, and then written off in bankruptcy by their new owners. This tactic is incredibly profitable.
But honestly, I don't think that's why they are shutting down Bioware. It's simply about money, and Bioware hasn't been making much yet still is costing a lot to keep going. Their recent titles were duds, and it takes years to make new ones.
The saudis spent millions on this deal and they aim to recoup some of the cost of their buyout. It's pretty standard for bought out or merged companies to immediately get downsized for this reason.
There has to be some kind of checks and balances that prevent a corporation from buying another profitable corporation and making it unprofitable on purpose almost immediately every single time.
There is. Its called voting. Not enough people do it because they labor under the delusion both parties are the same.
We can fix many economic ills by legislating and punishing actors that act monopolisitically and in bad faith to their product.
Or we can arrest brown people to make ourselves feel better.
I don't think the Democratic party establishment cares about corporate takeovers as much as you think it does.
For one, most politicians who make it to prominent positions are already going to generally be more pro-business already and may not care.
And then, even then if they do want to push for progressive policies, restricting monopolies is going to be much lower on the rung of priorities than things like the environment or healthcare, as it should be. Monopolies and the pervasiveness of private equity firms are terrible, but given that political capital is limited all things being equal I'd rather it be spent on slowing global climate change.
While EA has absolutely done this to so many poor games (RIP Red Alert), it has to be noted that Bioware absolutely drove itself into the ground. EA actually was insanely hands-off with Bioware, and most of the issues with the studio in the past 10 years stem directly from Bioware's own internal management.
What do you mean. BioWare hasn’t released a successful product in over a decade. The fact they were allowed to languish this long is absurd. They should have been axed after Andromeda and Anthem. The fact they were allowed to fester after Veilguard is unreal.
This is the natural and inevitable result of unchecked capitalism. It is why every game of monopoly (played according to the actual rules) has a winner. Eventually one guy owns everything. This is a known issue that we have just decided not to solve.
This is the future conservatives voted for. Unregulated capitalism will always end in disaster. It HAS to. Corporations are meant to grow and swallow others to the extent that it’s legal to do so. Without safeguards in place monopolies will pop up everywhere and the quality of everything will go down to maximize profit.
Gamers are finally waking up. What your saying is why people are radicalized against capitalism and why everywhere but both America people are rioting
Late stage capitalism is doing this with everything, even research into cancer
Do you know how many times we have had start ups pop up with evidence they have a vaccine path for cancer then a bigger corporate interest buys then and then shuts them down
It's how they keep monopolies alive and in power and they are invested in not having things grow because it keeps their power but they still have to crush any progress or art from anywhere else
It happens a lot. Buy a company, extract the value, run it into the ground. At least it was EA, which had some beloved IPs but sucked ass even before being bought by Saudi Arabia. I just hope the IPs get sold to someone else that does something good with it.
That’s just like what Burton did with the independent snowboard companies, Forum, Foursquare, Alien Workshop and, most tragically, Jeenys. There were 2 others. Beginning in 2004, and for the next 10 years they bought and shuttered 6 thriving brands, each a perceived threat. A simply disgraceful way to conduct business, esp in a burgeoning sport where the expression of individuality is its core.
If anyone needed a model to see how wildly successful a business with myriad labels in the same silo can be, all they neede to do is ask Claude how many companies nestle are under the LVMH umbrella.
If it was a crime pretty much all U.S. major companies would be shut down. It just doesn’t work for their wealthy class to put restrictions on those kinds of practices and we know the little guy will never have the leverage to do something about it. We live in a fucking nightmare.
If it was a crime pretty much all U.S. major companies would be shut down. It just doesn’t work for their wealthy class to put restrictions on those kinds of practices and we know the little guy will never have the leverage to do something about it. We live in a fucking nightmare.
EA is destroying everything they touch. Fuck them. Not buying a single EA game again. No matter what. I can't support a company that just killed the favorite franchise for many players.
Because EA pushed Bioware to a stupid release schedule. Between 2007 and 2013 Bioware released 6 games. One game every year. Even if we don't count the first Mass Effect and DAO the other 4 games were all developed in roughly 2 years each. considering how big those games were that's an absurdly short dev time.
EA squeezed them dry, ran the teams ragged until they broke and people started leaving. And some who were left were not capable of actually producing quality material without oversight from the people who had left.
The management wasn't working as supposed to, they weren't managing they expected things to just work. EA corporate side and Bioware. There are enough stories from ex-bioware devs that say that. But you can't run a project as big as game development like that. It works until it doesn't. And clearly despite it not working with andromeda and Anthem they had not learned the lesson. even with Veilguard there was a serious attempt to shift responsibility for how the game was being received. As multiple people have said from their team they were surprised the game didn't do well.
And it's not like they were alone, other devs with other games that were flops also had the same reactions. there have been multiple big budget games that failed utterly in the last 6-7 years.
There are checks and balances. It's called The Sherman Antitrust Act. What you describe has been a problem in the United States since it's founding. We've dealt with this exact same problems time and time again and have solutions for them.
Only problem is our politicians are too lobbied (bribed) or afraid of being labelled "communist" by the dumbest guy you know to actually have the spine to use it.
It's odd because CEOs are responsible for bringing value to shareholders. Legally.
How is this not antithetical to this process? What value is there in buying companies, tanking them, and then liquidating like PE does? EA stock is in the garbage. How is this business format not illegal?
I guess now that it's a private company owned by Saudi Arabia nobody cares.
Nah this is like 95% BioWares own fault. Anthem was their own idea and would’ve been even worse without EA arguing to keep the flying in which was the one fun part of that game. Andromeda was entirely self-inflicted wounds and EA was willing to give more time and money but BW said no. Veilguard was all BW’s own ineptitude and probably only made it out the door due to EA. They strangled their only profitable product for years in SWTOR and almost killed that by never investing any development into it.
I’m as sad as anyone but this is deserved for the company. If it was independent it would’ve closed down years ago. I wish the individual members had options to transfer to other studios inside EA so I’m not for people just being fired, but BioWare as an entity was well past times to be put fown
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u/HankTuggins 7h ago
I don’t understand how what EA does isn’t just a straight up crime. There has to be some kind of checks and balances that prevent a corporation from buying another profitable corporation and making it unprofitable on purpose almost immediately every single time.