BioWare doesn’t own the IP, EA does. The studio at this point has no value to them and selling BioWare would only generate income if they included the ip which they won’t.
EA will either sit on the IP or get another studio to make a mass effect game.
Yep EA especially is just like a goddamn dragon with hoarding this stuff. Its practically tradition for them to buy a studio, shut it down, then sit on all their ips forever, likely forgetting they existed.
It's sadly more profitable for them to shut down the IPs that could be or are their competition rather than investing money into expanding that IP. You don't have to worry about Dragon Age flopping under you or flourishing under someone else when you can just slowly milk to death what you have while profiting off your big titles
Everything maximises profit now and it's trully sad
If that was why, all the game publishers would do it.
And they do not. Most game publishers are willing to licence IPs out, even often to fairly small companies (for example, BattleTech and Shadowrun which are IPs owned for videogames by MS, but which they licenced out).
EA's behaviour was unique in the games industry. No-one else habitually shut down studios and then just totally sat on IPs and didn't use them, because it's not "more profitable". There's not competition to a game you're not making. They're not "milking" anything. I'm not sure how think milking works, but you need a cow that's doing stuff, and not one in a vault forever!
This is actually a non-profit-maximizing behaviour. Maximizing profits would mean aggressively licencing this stuff out when it's unused (maybe not if you had a direct competitor, but EA has competitors to 99% of the stuff in the IP vault).
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u/Nickillaz 8h ago
So shutting it down is easier than selling it off? Surely some company would want Bioware even just for the name or the IP?