Im not incredibly upset... the talent who made the games they listed are already gone. But its just the sign of the times. American/western gaming is on life support
The talent didn’t vanish, it moved. A lot of it went to smaller studios, and that’s where some of the best western games of the last few years came from: Baldur’s Gate 3, Hades II, Clair Obscur. The big publishers are struggling. Western gaming isn’t.
This. Anybody in the working world, especially corporate, know that if the company holds back great talent, they will move elsewhere. EA, Sony, Xbox aren't the only publishers so devs have either gone to the other ones or self publish.
IO did get hit hard by Microsoft recently though. They pulled the plug on a contract right after 007 on a project, a friend of mine lost her job and the 007 bonus from sales, just like that. I can't remember if it was a third or half the staff must go. The big ones still control the money for the smaller ones, far 2 often.
The Pathfinder games were way too wordy and felt very hostile to newcomers, which I was at the time. I had just finished Larian games so it was very off-putting. Rogue Trader is in that sweet spot of welcoming enough for both newcomers and veterans of the genre for me. It also helped that the world of Warhammer is way more interesting than the generic world of Pathfinder for me.
I adore Colony Ship, an indie CRPG. But if the Pathfinder games were hostile to newcomers, this one absolutely hates you. Combat is very aggravating but also super rewarding once you get into it.
The only game I've played that hates the player more (in combat) is the dev's previous game The Age of Decadence.
The are both super niche, and definitely not for everyone. But if you persist they are both incredible.
The pathfinder games are pretty great for pathfinder players, but yeah that makes them a lot less approachable. But I like that they make those games for a slightly more niche audience.
Maybe I'm easily impressed but I adored Pathfinder and it's 'fuck you' nature. It really hit the spot after months of loading Baldur's Gate 3 up with as many difficulty mods as are available on console. But to be fair, I have like four guides open just to play for an hour...
I feel like Rogue Trader is way more wordy, especially with all of the tech-speak. Also, Pathfinder UI is more intuitive - the wheel leveling system in Rogue Trader is awkward to navigate.
Gotta say, as a massive fan of the books what they have shown so far does not really fit with that universe. For fans of the IP i think its gonna be a letdown. For people who just watched the show super casually it might be fine but I think they might be underestimating how hardcore the fanbase is.
Owlcat's CRPGs are fantastic, but I'm not sold on a Mass Effect-ish Expanse game, especially considering The Expanse started as a tabletop game setting never published and eventually turned into a book series.
I really would have loved to see an Expanse CRPG in that vein. The tight corridors of ships and stations would have lended better I think to that structure than a third person shooter.
I agree with this, the video game industry has just matured as most other industries do in America. Over time, it moves from grassroots/organic companies to a consolidated few. A few indie studios pop up here and there, but they grow or get swallowed up by the big guys. It’s normal in capitalism
The unfortunate thing is that while that's true, EA ultimately owns the IP to Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc. So those particular franchises are essentially dead.
Like Dragon age is just Grim Dark Fantasy. I can point to a dozen series that are Grim Dark Fantasy. The thing they do with the Fade, and how magic works in the world is really cool, bought the idea of magic being a curse as well as a blessing is not exactly rare in fantasy fiction.
And Mass Effect is awesome and has great alien races, but really as a setting it's kind of generic. The big draw of Mass Effect is the Reapers, and in a post Mass Effect 3 universe there isn't much you can do on that front that doesn't just retcon everything else you've already done.
It was pretty much from around 2008-2016 or so. Basically Bethesda, Bioware, Rockstar, Obsidian and CDPR put out their best work.
At the same time, Japanese gaming had started to decline, they kept making MMO styles games for single player. They still had some nice games but there was a clear shift happening.
A lot of it I think is the Japanese devs chased what they insisted was the mainstream US market, abandoning their actual fans. Then when the Western devs got that market, they did the same thing. It never works but that will never stop companies and their shills from justifying it.
Eventually you do that too much and people lose passion completely. They won't argue, they won't complain, they won't give you their opinion. They will just go do something else. Without that passionate fanbase, the shill replacements that followed them also get bored, they are always fickle, part of their fun is just ruining it for passionate people, since they don't have passions of their own.
Even now you're beginning to see the remakes and show adaptations are no longer working. The older players completely gave up, so that buzz isn't generating anymore. The newer players don't jump in and create that buzz either, I think they already know it's not worth it.
I think was some fatigue to the dense Western open world games, after Skyrim and AC brought it mainstream.
We're seeing that over-saturation with the Souls Like and Character Action genres right now.
The Open-world Western/Classic RPG format started to get repetitive (ubisoft had a lot to do with that, imo), and if the combat and RPG progression didn't hit well -- they just got boring.
Go to marker talk to someone, go to new marker, look around for pre-marked "clues" or maybe follow a trail, battle some baddies in really boring and easy combat, go back to person who gave you quest.
A beautiful rich world, and fun combat can save it (for me, Horizon and Ghost Of Tsushima are examples of the boring open world loop - saved by engaging Combat and/or RPG mechanics and progression) -- but that open-world gameplay loop itself got way to over-saturated.
Mmm. I don't think GTA is going to do as good as people are expecting. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it'll fail by an means (I don't know if it's possible for gta to fail even if it's pure shit tbh) but I don't see the excitement surrounding it that I was expecting.
I wouldn't say that Riot is exactly going strong. League is mostly coasting on the remnants of its past glory and is consistently failing to attract new players. Their recent (failed) attempt to pull back old players by releasing League Classic in a blatant appeal to nostalgia is a sign of desperation IMO. League isn't going to die anytime soon but it seems likely that it'll slowly decline over the next decade or so and eventually fade into irrelevancy outside of a core group of die-hard fans. Riot's attempts to diversify into other genres have been mostly unsuccessful, with Legends of Runeterra failing to achieve long-term commercial viability, 2XKO being dead on arrival, and Arcane flopping pretty hard with Season 2 and disappointing a lot of fans. Their MMO seems slated to come out sometime around when hell freezes over, and the enormous development and upkeep cost associated with MMOs means that it's fairly unlikely IMO to actually bring a return on investment at this point. Their only truly successful projects in the last ten years have been Arcane S1, TFT, and Valorant, and none of those are enough alone or together to carry their IP into the future. Overall Riot isn't in immediate danger of collapse, but they're definitely floundering and don't seem to have much of a plan.
That is not what being a subsidiary means. Unless the parent closes the subsidiary and subsumes it. These are still Western development studios, with western game developers, developing western-style games.
Having an Asian parent company, does not make a studio sitting in California, with a California-based dev team -- an "eastern" game.
Housemarque is now part of Sony -- its still a Finnish game developer and studio, not Japanese.
But the devouring of devs by these mega corps IS an issue.
Forget the location of tecent because it actually doesnt matter. But EA xbox sony etc did this in 2010s and into 20202s and look whats happened. Its causes bloat and corps come in and lay off and close the devs.
The hope is that indie companies can come in and fill that hole. But the hardware market being so shit, its going to be hard to get companies to survive.
The way they are operating, in this fashion, is largely affecting western companies.
Japanese and chinese companies tend to not struggle with bloated dev teams and costs like I just said.
With the struggle of getting access to consoles and the rising costs is causing companies to close down or consolidate due to the corporations greed of profit always needing to be growing.
This isnt an issue thats unique to gaming, but its unique to american gaming companies. Because japanese and chinese companies tend to have smaller budgets and teams. So they arent seeing the level of shrinkage in workforce we had.
We are on pace for 13000 layoffs this year in the US and Europe. 50,000 since 2022.
The pandemic caused severe over-hiring throughout the tech world, and heavily in gaming. There was also every big studio miscalculating on live-service -- and making large team for multiplayer focus -- that also dried up immensely, post pandemic. And AI is drastically effecting coding jobs.
There is also just more competition. So games have to be good.
The revival of 8/16-bit style games has really launched the Indie market the past 10 years.
Games sales are still going quite strong.(Covid bump is very visable)
Epic has laid off over 2,000 people in the last 3 years and are posting shit about how "programming is hard" while launching their broken vibecoded storefront . . . "going strong" seems like some serious hyperbole lol
Creative Assembly going strong? The same Creatice Assembly that hasn't releases an outstanding Total War game since Shogun 2, which was 15 years ago now?
Riot is owned by Tencent since 2012 (Chinese), Epic is owned by Tencent (not western), Sony (Not western) and Tim Sweeney and haven’t created anything worthwhile since 2020 with Fall Guys and Fortnite (2017). Both of which are garbage and haven’t evolved in any tangible way in the last decade. Sumo is owned by Tencent (chinese) and have only produced Sonic (Sega IP… Not western) and Forza (another multiplayer game with little to no story). Creative Assembly may be british but is owned by Sega (Not western).
Rockstar is the only producer in this list that qualifies and has arguably the best western franchises (pun unintended) IP and will most likely have the highest grossing game in history, this much is true. The highest grossing game does not necessarily mean it will be the best game and will sell because of IP developed from 1997 - 2013 ( it’s been 14 years since the last GTA renowned for its multiplayer) which is 8 years since the last release and 8 years from RDR1 to RDR2. In other words, little to no output over 2.5 decades as the leading story telling producer in the industry. Bethesda and Zeni Max were acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Since then they have released indiana Jones and starfield. Starfield flopped and Indiana Jones is unoriginal IP and released on Xbox Game Pass (Free Player acquisition through Microsoft). It’s been 11 years since their last release in successful original IP (Fallout 4).
CD Projekt Red is a western producer that overhauled their dev team (in favor of liberalism) and released Cyberpunk which was a broken unpolished game on release and was only fixed 3 years after release in 2023. 5 years before that in 2015 was their last successful release in the Witcher 3 which they are STILL RELEASING UPDATES FOR.
Activision (owned by microsoft) has acquired Halo’s IP which was purchased from Bungie (owned by Sony) which has not had a successful title since Destiny 2 which released in 2017! (Marathon Flopped as well, no player retention).
The reason why Warhammer games have been so successful and have a cult following is because their development is handed over to small studios and the IP remains intact.
So the original claim is true with all this evidence. Western gaming is dead outside of Rockstar. Massive, money hungry corporations have prioritised regular updates on unpolished multiplayer games, virtue signalling devs who are dead set on ruining franchises, and micro transactions over story rich plot lines, world building, emotional storytelling, and musical production. All the things that made gaming feel immersive, have been sold off to the highest bidder in exchange for a pay check and some dog shit dev team. Every successful title from 2010 onwards has stayed true to its original IP while adding additional world building and mechanics into their game. RDR 2, ME2 and ME3, Dragon Age Origins to Inquisition, Fallout 3, NV, and 4, Batman Arkham series, Dishonoured 2. Assassin’s Creed up until Unity (unpolished at release). Spiderman etc. etc. This is what killed Bioware and what has taken the soul out of the gaming industry. If you’re going to rip off IP, make it true to the writers vision, or don’t bother making it at all.
Have a good friend at the studio. He was around for ME3 as a junior and worked his way up in a non story or art department. Not every single person is gone just the ones people know the names of.
Bioware still had the talent, that's what's so tragic. It just got utterly squandered by EA's bone-headed live-service nonsense demands. That's half the reason DA:V and Anthem ended up the way that they did.
Dude Anthem was fully on BioWare. This has been a well known fact for a while now. Ex employees have come forward that EA gave BioWare free reign to do whatever they wanted. The only thing EA forced them to do was keep the flying mechanics as that was going to be removed
I don't disagree. But if your corporate overlords come and tell a traditionally single-player studio to go "dowhateveryou want....as long as it's a live service", a genre they had no experience or discipline expertise in, I think it's pretty obvious how that would play out.
Actually, if open letters are to believed, ea might be the only reason anthem was as good as it managed to be. . . And that the entire clusterfuck around it was mostly biowares fault, or rather managements fault. Over reliance on "bioware magic" or last minute crunch to literally anybody else. Its said that half the staff didnt even know what they were making till the e3 "real gameplay footage" came out then had to scramble to make what was in the trailer.
The whole thing was a hot mess and a crystalized example of corpo beauracracy and too many managers
My contention is that Bioware had no business making a live-service title in the first place. A decision to pivot an RPG developer into that style of game out of nowhere reeks of corporate meddling from the very beginning. If EA salvaged it, it's because they wanted the live service gamble to desperately succeed.
SWTOR was made by BioWare Austin, a completely separate team that got spun up specifically to make that. BioWare Edmonton (the RPG-focused studio) tried to pivot into live service themselves with Anthem. That was the real misstep.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons.
The whole development process was insanely sloppy... the live service part of it really doesn't carry most the blame when they struggled to even choose a name for the game
the studio leadership just sucked... they would've failed even at making a single player game.
We keep seeing it too, Suicide Squad, everything Sony keeps forcing out, studio heads are so blinded by dollar signs, jealousy watching Pubg, Fortnite, GTA online, print money, they keep forcing stupid out the door..
Dragon Age: Inquisition turning out okay was the worst thing to happen to Bioware. Their development process was already awful by then, but the result did well enough they didn't see a need to change. That led to the Andromeda and Anthem train wrecks.
And it wasn’t even that good. It had its moments but it was a weak year for games and Witcher 3 really outclassed it the year after. Gotta say the Trespasser dlc saved it a bit but the main game story was poor.
The EA execs forced Bioware to shove out mindless moneymakers in a competitive market instead of true sequels to ME and DA. They should've all been fired when BG3 became a smashing success within the traditional WRPG genre, which is what DA3 should've been. If they wanted to make a live-service, f2p style game, they could've spun off the already successful ME3 co-op mode. I see the same thing happening with Blizzard, where SC3 has been deprioritized despite all indications that it would sell extremely well in the current environment. The RTS market has been completely desaturated and internet speeds are great while GPUs prices have gone through the roof.
Anthem suffered much the same way No Man's Sky did: Rushed by the publisher to make a quick buck, launched amidst bigger AAA games, then the publisher got mad when the game flopped due to over-hyping a game they rushed.
What sucks is Bioware saw working on fixing Anthem when EA shut it down. They had completely redone a lot of the systems, but EA would rather pull the plug than actually try letting devs make a good game.
No Man's Sky came back from this scenario and is one of the best space exploration games today, so I think Anthem could have become something amazing if EA wasn't a bunch of cowards.
It's not about faith of cowardice. Those things don't even enter the equation. EA is an entity of pure greed. There isn't a single consideration in their hearts except immediate profit. I imagine an oil company that decided to pump money out of people's pockets instead of viscous liquids from the ground.
It just got utterly squandered by EA's bone-headed live-service nonsense demands. That's half the reason DA:V and Anthem ended up the way that they did.
They actually didn't demand it. This has been talked about by former Bioware employees. Mark Darrah for example has a YouTube channel talking about this.
Gist is that higher ups at Bioware were the ones to push the live service angle for both Anthem and DA thinking it's what EA wanted to hear. EA was actually a bit skeptical about it but okayed the pitches. While I understand the instinct to put all blame on EA, because they absolutely deserve it, Bioware's downfall is almost entirely self-inflicted.
From the stories being told EA was being ludicrously hands-off with them and gave them way too many chances. It is kind of crazy how much they let Bioware get away with.
Completely WRONG. There have been plenty of evidence that if it wasn't for EA, the studio would have closed doors long before that. EA, of all publishers, on the contrary gave way too much leeway and had way too much tolerance for Bioware's bullshit. There wasn't any talent remaining and you'd have to be crazy to believe otherwise after seeing what the last Dragon Age turned out to be ...
It's pretty well-documented at this point that a large part of the reason DA:V was such a middling flop was because it got rebooted to be a live-service (at EA's behest), and then rebooted again to move it back to single-player after Anthem crashed and burned. So I'm not as willing to lay that mess entirely at the feet of Bioware. EA can keep their corporate profit-chasing meddling and shove it.
EA worst move with BioWare was mandating the use of the Frostbite Engine which just wasn’t suited for story RPG games that BioWare specialized in.
Nearly everything else was on BioWare. They made the choice to go with a live service looter shooter and ignore competitors like Destiny and the Division. They are the ones with issues with mismanagement (BioWare spent 6 of its 7 years on developing Anthem on pre production. It took EA to mandate the best feature flying like Iron Man in the game) and crunch culture (BioWare Magic.) EA didn’t make BioWare treat its subsidiary studios in Montreal and Austin like crap.
I love BioWare for its incredible games with KOTOR and the Mass Effect Trilogy. But BioWare brought it on itself with 3 bombs in a row with Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilguard.
And its getting lots of upvotes --- a month before Rockstar is about to release the biggest, and highest grossing, game in history.
And Bioware failed because they fell behind in Classic and Western RPG - which are arguably at peak now -- with CDPR and Lorian knocking it out of the park.
My thought exactly, just wanted to make sure I understood OPs point properly. GTA6 is expected to cost the US $1B in lost revenue due to people calling out sick. source
But Western gaming has not had the dip Movies had -- they got a massive boost by Covid (everyone being home, alone and bored made for a great gaming market) -- and now have come back to earth with more normal trends. Not dying. Just changing. Some old studios are dying as new ones take the mantle. (like CDPR, Larian, and Remedy).
Also -- Box Office is actually having a pretty strong bounce back in 2026. Strongest year since pre-Covid.
Not spider-man alone-- there where 5 massive "AAA" blockbuster successes this year. And a ton of wildly successful low budget smaller films from studios like A24 like Backrooms.
No. It's going stronger than ever. The torch is just being passed to smaller more talented studios. The large well known franchises are on life support though. This is likely due to bloat and talent deciding to leave for other opportunities. Bioware has been failing since around 2014-2015.
World wide is down in general, but western developers have seen 30+ (probably way more) devs shut down and a reduction of about 25% in the workforce.
We're looking at like 50,000 people have been laid off since covid.
And yes corporations are largely the cause of this. Didnt say otherwise. Western gaming, particularly north america is seeing a pretty big decline. Europe is fairing a bit better.
But Asian devs arent experiencing the drop at the level NA is.
Western gaming is not on life support. People have got to stop with this doomer mentality. There are issues with the industry, but there are problems with everyone around the world. There are still plenty of western games releasing that are doing great and reviewing well. Studios close and new ones pop up in their place.
On life support? Nope, Bioware is just one company whose death we saw coming for years. Since the 360 era, the indie market has blown up and many good games and franchises has come out since then.
Western gaming no longer relies on the Big Three & it's partners to thrive, and that is good.
30+ devs have closed since 2022 due to corporations laying them off and shutting down studuos. And 25% of the workforce has left game development all together.
Honestly any company engaged in creative endeavors is going to struggle to keep catching lightening in a bottle for that long. Mix in corporate interference and personnel loss and it's incredibly difficult.
yeah i bet gta 6 and call of duty are really on the ropes out here, you guys are truly mind melted if you think western games are struggling, what about bauldrs gate, the new star wars games, overwatch has millions of players weekly, theres subnautica 2 which has also been a success in fucking early access just complete cognitive dissonance
AAA companies are also a meme lol, indie has been where it's at for a long ass time. Do you think the artists and developers just disappear when laid off from the big companies? No obviously. They move on, often to a indie studio, or founding their own, and then make all the great games that have been releasing.
is killing creativity.
you think AAA companies care about creativity? all they do is maximize profits. you're barking up the wrong tree buddy
Western gaming is not dying in life support, you are misattributing the old guard that is dying with it all dying. New studio are being made and developing incredible games every year.
Its whats happening yet for you its "objectively wrong".
Any industry that is on pace/predicted to lay off 13k this year and 50k over the last 4. And then 25% of the jobs not being recovered. Isnt objectively doing well.
But yea keep calling someone a halfwit. When you arent even sure what youre talking about. You couldnt even tell i was mocking your absolute (and incorrect) statement.
This community aims to be a welcoming environment for all gamers. Your post or comment has been removed for violating our zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and harassment.
Slurs, discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, and targeted harassment of individuals will result in an immediate and permanent ban.
Personal attacks, insults, toxic behavior, and aggressive "console warring" or fanboyism are not tolerated here. Attack the argument, not the person.
Oh no! Instead of getting more $80 Quadruple A "bangers" from long dead studios filled with drones making yearly shooter clones, we're gonna get more $20 indie games made by passionate people who like video games. How horrible.
What sucks is that the IPs die with the studio. I highly doubt EA will allow any other studio handle those IPs and they definitely won’t sell them. So that means there will never be another Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, etc. any hope of ever seeing further entries or reboots are gone.
Its all their own doing. They dont make things the consumer want. They make woke bs and wonder why no one buys their slop. Then blame us for being mean
1.9k
u/Informalwizards 8h ago
Anyone paying attention saw this coming for a long time now. Still sad to see it happen and I hope the best for those that lost their jobs.