Relevant music trivia: Saliva (of Click Click Boom fame) still produces music, but is an entirely different band than the one people probably think of or hear on the radio.
An interesting philosophical question about when might be the right time to rename a band. Do the current members even feel like they have a real identity? When they tour and play the hits from the first 4 albums, are they just a cover band?
Imagine what must go through the minds of the original members of a band like that.
Like, imagine they start a band in high school, spend years touring, and eventually all leave the band one by one as they get older. But then, one day, years after the last one left, they all get together for a reunion at somebody's house when they hear on the radio that their band is going to be playing a show in town soon. They look around the room and realize that every original member of the band is right there, but they are somehow not that band.
I bet they all individually think "hell yeah, I'm playing in Saliva..." and none of them ever broaches the subject of whether they're actually the band they think they are
Eh, there's a ton of well known acts where the frontman is the only permanent member. Heck, virtually every pop artist operates in that realm. Might be less common in rock, but it's not uncommon.
The entire band changing over, including the frontman and/or creative force? That's extremely rare.
You can be successful, but it requires leaderships and confidence in minimal or singular creative leadership.
Many American studios have become design by committee, which leads to a bunch of ideas trying to coexist unnaturally. Creative leaders mentoring and allowing the next creative leaders to take their shot is needed.
I think ultimately the thing that is killing great studios are executives that mistake themselves for creatives. A rich guy in a suit that has never played video games cannot be trusted to decide what will connect with gaming audiences. Theres a reason indie studios with 5 geeks and a dream are pumping out bangers right now.
I'm gonna go against the grain and say no, any company can be a ship of Theseus. But the important part is it has to be nurtured, there needs to be a culture of not only hiring proper talent, but also both teaching the newer hires the lessons of the old, and then allowing them to develop said talent.
A quick example is Disney animation, they've been around for over 100 years now, and have had multiple eras of success with completely different teams. The 9 old men of old 2D weren't there for the 90's "renaissance", and the 90's people were largely gone for the 2010's CG boom.
I unfortunately don't have similar examples for games on the tip of my tongue, maybe it's because games are a newer art form, maybe it's because they're actually even more of a commercial product. Regardless, the point is that in theory it should be doable to have a multi generational successful studio, if managed properly.
Speaking as a Command and Conquer fan, it won't happen. They'll just sit on the IP's collecting dust until they eventually enter the public domain so they can occasionally put out a shitty mobile game and collect some revenue from the property this way.
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u/Tiavornever used DDR3; PC: 5800X3D, 9070XT, 32GB DDR4, CachyOS6h ago
they could make them public domain now if they wanted to.
I don't think Larian wants that. They seem much happier developing their own IP.
Swen said the team wasn't excited to continue anything D&D related. That's why they aren't making a BG4. I doubt they would pay money to run into similar issues with Dragon Age.
I know EA has been going down a shitty path for a while now, and BioWare basically offed themselves, but make no mistake: the new Saudi owners will cater only to the gun-and-ball mouthbreathers going forward.
Just because you get the rights to the star wars brand. Doesn't mean you can just remake whatever you want. You still need permission from whoever owns the copyright.
Downfall of BW started when EA acquired them and made them move away from the identity of making single player narrative rpg choices matter games to stupid multiplayer games with MTX, implanting a toxic culture at work, making them release half backed DA2 then forcing them to move to Frostbite engine which had no tools to make a proper rpg games.
ME3 was celebrated for being "the best multiplayer mode of the "force multiplayer into everything" era".
Also, a lot of Bioware's mistakes are Bioware's own fault:
The ME3 ending was Casey Hudson and Mac Waters locking themselves in an office to rewrite the ending months prior to release, and stepping out to tell the scenario writers " you have 4 weeks to make this new ending work".
Many of Bioware's staff are on record for saying that "The worst thing that ever happened to this company is the success of Dragon Age: Origins" because that's when the Bioware management started sniffing their own farts and believing that "Bioware Magic" could solve everything.
Andromeda was heavily meh because Bioware choose to send it to their Montreal office which at the time was entirely made up of newly promoted managers who hadn't learned how to be game dev managers and devs who were fresh in the doors and weren't ready to pick up an IP with as much weight as Mass Effect.
Anthem flopped because EA gave Bioware 7 years of dev time and Bioware blew 5 of those years on nothing, not even having an elevator pitch for what they wanted the game to be; in the Jason Schrier autopsy interviews, devs reports that managers would go into a meeting needing to make critical decisions, argue for 8 hours and leave at the end of the day with no decisions being made and thus nothing for the devs to work on.
yeah, it really wasnt needed and was tacked on, but it was really fun. playing a geth supreme walking up and melee any enemy to death is something i miss to this day
The phrase "BioWare Magic," sounds to me like leaders/execs excusing/ignoring their failures of planning, management, and strategy because the end product turned out fantastic.
I've seen it in other businesses too, where "revenue covers all sins." The delusion that because the end result was good/profitable, that most of the decisions and structure used to get there must be roughly as good as the end product.
I imagine that many times someone raised a concern, leadership essentially said, "We don't have to do it the RIGHT way, we have the BioWare magic!"
Many of Bioware's staff are on record for saying that "The worst thing that ever happened to this company is the success of Dragon Age: Origins"
Do you have any names or articles or anything like that? Not really that I'm doubting you, but I haven't really ever kept up with the actual bioware employees who were around at that time despite Mass Effect 1 and DA:O being in my top 5 favorite games lol. I'd love to get a bit more insight about why it all went to shit.
I will say ahead of time that Jason doesn't actually outright name any employees because he cites that many of the employees whom he talked to as telling him that they were explicitly told "don't talk to the press".
To put it simply, Origin was a mess of development with management flying by the seat of the pants and the devs pulling massive crunch time because management could never truly settle on what they wanted and where they wanted to focus.
The fact that it turned out great was what was coined as "Bioware Magic" (which in most other companies/industries is understood to actually be "one manager or director who trades years of his/her life expectancy in order to desperately pull the threads to hold a project together to get it to a successful launch")
Anthem flopped but oddly enough it might have made a tiny loss or be in the black. So many were still huffing Bioware hype that it made ~$105m in the first month. Of course those sales dropped off hard when it became obvious that the game was trash.
Veilguard was a disaster and the company rightly died off after that debacle. It was hilarious how all the game reviewers gave it 80%+ and called gamers hating on it right-wing lunatics. I guess EA spent some of their marketing bux to make that happen.
I dunno, I think was really how bad the release of Anthem was that killed them. Not only was is a direct competitor with Destiny (which was at the time like envy of the gaming world) and if it had been even remotely playable and at all fun at release, it could have reinforced the studio and kept them healthy. Or if they had fixed it and supported it like CP77, they could have recovered.
Instead it was a broken, dogshit release with bad balance and lazy mechanics, and no endgame at all. When the release wasn't great, it was promptly and completely abandoned. Veilguard was a pathetic last gasp, Anthem was the killshot.
And anthem was BioWare demanding ea let them make it, not ea making them make it. Pretty sure they made up half tbt game day before ea was showing up to see a playable demo to keep finding rolling or just scrap it.
Maybe it was like that forever ago, but I have had credits go to escrow multiple times only to sub and get them back and I’ve been playing since 2020. Buy a sub and you’ll get your credits back
It's literally never worked the way he said lol. He encountered a bug and instead of trying to fix it or asking customer service for help, he decided to hold a grudge for years and slander the game when it comes up. Quite the choice lol
That is definitely not supposed to happen, I've subbed multiple times after long periods of being preferred status and I got my escrow credits back every time. If you still care enough you can probably put a ticket in with support and get your credits back.
And if you had googled that for all of 5 minutes you would see that that isn't what is supposed to have happened and you probably could have contacted customer service to resolve it?
it's always the same. Everything bad = EA. Everything good is the developer.
Like, EA said to bioware why don't you take 5 years to think about the start of maybe getting into the early stages of development of Mass Effect 5. Obviously they don't want that.
EA has regularly been shown to actually be pretty easy to work with.
Even when people look back at some of the old classics like Sim City 3000. EA were able to acquire Maxis purely because they were going broke. We don't get that masterpiece without EA. And of course EA just lets them finish development and then work with Will Wright to do The Sims and then Spore.
You can dislike EA and criticize them for 100s of things. but largely they seem to be a pretty good publisher.
EA bought Bioware in 2007, TOR was announced in 2008, Dragon Age Origins came out in 2009, and Mass Effect 2 came out in 2010. It was a slow death primarily caused by their own incompetence when the OGs left the company, EA just enabled it while trying to suck as much as they could out of it.
yes they had a say in it as they helped fund it. Thats how that works. So did microsoft who actually published it. Your notion of how all this works is really naive. Check the reporting Jason Schrier has done on Bioware to get a better look at how this all works. You will find that EA actually did very little to manage the studio and they let them run themselves. EA at times was so removed that they didnt even know that Anthem was a mess for years. Only discovering that when bioware asked for a delay
I know I'm going against the hivemind but most evidence points to Bioware more or less doing themselves in. EA put them on life support but Veilguard and "early development" ME5 got them to finally pull the plug.
Origin and Bullfrog did too. Go look at their releases before EA closed the doors. Bad flop after bad flop. The Bullfrog that made Theme Hospital and Theme Park was long gone by the time EA shut them down.
Except that isn't true. People forgot that these studio's while under the EA flag were pretty autonomous and could make their own decisions. The fact that some of these games did poorly, were fully developer choices, not EA corporate choices.
The choice to close bioware also wasn't EA's decision but the Saudi owners decision as they were bought by the Saudi's in august. That Saudi take over also left EA with a massive debt.
Not entirely. Dig further into the history and you'll see that there was a chain of causation and effect between management decisions and how the games later in the company's history were developed.
It should be noted that Westwood and Bullfrog were completely broke when EA aquired them....(don't know about the others).
So they kinda killed themselves first.
EA were extremely hands-off with Mass Efect Andromeda, Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If anything, I suspect the founders leaving in 2012 was the real trigger for the collapse.
It’s funny reading the breakdown of it. It’s like EA went hands off and BioWare just couldn’t figure their lives out at that point. I do believe EA pushed them to Anthem, which was insane because that’s not a game type the studio is known for.
They made anthem of their own accord and only went with what they did because that was pretty much the only thing they had available to show the higherups. If they hadn't fucked around for most of their development maybe they'd have had a much different type of game to present than the hastily cobbled together ironman sim they only created for the presentation.
Only thing EA did was say "that's actually pretty cool".
It's an interesting read, but the important part is that the defining feature of Anthem (flying exoskeletons) was added to impress EA executives, because the previous demos of the game had been sorely disappointing.
Andromeda had major issues because they were pushed to use the Frostbite engine by EA, which was not meant for what they were trying to do and ultimately had to throw the game together in the last 2 years of development. Would letting them use Unreal, as previous ME games had, lead to a smash hit amazing game of the year? Maybe, maybe not, but having to use Frostbite was a major impediment.
Anthem also had issues with Frostbite, and notably in 2016 as Andromeda and Anthem were actively being developed using Frostbite, EA pulled the BioWare devs with experience using the engine on the DA team (they'd made Inquisition using Frostbite and so had the best idea of how to make it work) to go help make the new FIFA game using Frostbite. Because Frostbite was meant for FPS games, and anything else is a big pain in the ass to make with it.
You gotta be shitting me here. Hands off with Veilguard? After the initial, singleplayer version of DA4 was canceled, the DA team was ordered to create a multiplayer live-service game a la Anthem, and then three years into that EA told them to scrap the multiplayer and live service elements and make it a single player game instead. That is not hands off in the slightest. EDIT: Worth noting that EA also only gave the DA team 2 years iirc correctly to remake Veilguard as a single player game, and then would give extremely narrow extensions that gave more time for development but never enough for the team to commit to any big changes.
Jason Schreier has written multiple articles about the development efforts of Bioware, including The Veilguard. According to his reports, EA has been very hands-off all the way. The decision to move Veilguard to multiplayer came from the studio heads.
The studio heads did not magically appear in their offices out of the aether. They were there because EA, the owners of BioWare, wanted them to be there. Casey Hudson, the man who sold them Anthem as a live-service, multiplayer game, was not brought in because EA expected him to make more singleplayer games; he was brought in because EA was expecting him to deliver on Anthem and make more games like it, as for with their games-as-a-service philosophy.
Pretty sure articles on Anthem's develoment state that EA actually advised the Bioware executives not to work on Frostbite, but Bioware refused to budge on using Frostbite.
similar thing happened with MS, the biggest mistake they did was to let them be themselves, companies need someone supervising projects, if nobody is policing them nothing will get done.
Da veilguard isn't hand off, they originally want a live service, the. Changed their mind sometime later.
Of course having some questionable design choice that has been seen in multiple game to the point it become a pattern doesn't help.
Which contributed to the whole company just collapsed a few months later into just a crew for me5 and well, likely they have the same insufferable writing, generic combat, the whole 2 billion objective marker and fart trail + bright neon healing vask + your character relentlessly tell you where to go issue. So EA saw how da veilguard imploded and they just cut their loses.
a lot of hate that Capcom got was very undeserved, specially during the PS3/360 era.
like all games that got shit on by gamers like Resident Evil 5-6 and DMC to name some are seeing more positively now that people actually played them and had fun with those compared to how they were treated during release when games were criticized for not being like previous entries.
Why is everyone blaming EA? They tried hands on, got blamed for Anthem. They tried hands off, got blamed for Veilguard and Andromeda
This is literally like people trying to blame Riot because the Hytale company robbed them blind and did nothing, or like people blaming every company who made the mistake of owning Bungie etc
Sometimes "legendary game companies" just suck ass all on their own
When something fails one time, often there are many interrelated things, any bad combination of a couple of them can be blamed for the failure. When it keeps happening 10+ times, different people, different companies, different cities and the one common variable is they were bought and take over by EA, well that's a pattern.
Practically speaking EAs mode of operation is buying studios who invested heavily in developing strong well liked IP, but maybe weren't so profitable or have cash flow issues. Then they poach talent, add their "mark" and effectively strip mine the IP in the name of profit. A couple bad or mediocre games later the IP is basically worthless and all those talented people who created the IP left the company if they could.
I'm a vintage Bioware fan, but you could see the influence of EA growing as the mass effect franchise went on. They've been basically a zombie of what they were for the last few years.
But don't take my word for it.
https://www.thegamer.com/ea-game-developer-shut-down/
It's not just EA. Take Anthem for example, Bioware became a textbook example of mismanagement and it was because EA came in and set down some order that the game even came out.
Them becoming a shell was their own fault for letting actual talent go and replacing them with people terrible at their jobs. The people today are not actual game devs, they are larpers.
You can blame EA for a lot of things, but it's not that EA was at their offices telling them to write trash. Studios don't make good games, individual people make good games, and those people moved on before EA knocked. With ME: Andromeda and Anthem wasn't the EA cashgrab part that was the nail, it were the bioware parts that were nowhere near what they produced before.
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u/ItsYaBoyBackAgain 7h ago edited 7h ago
RIP to one of the most legendary studios of all time. It's a shame how they became a shell of their former selves the last decade or so. Fuck EA.