They’re more venture capitalist than they are a gaming corporation at this point. I mean, the majority of their company is owned by Saudi Arabia. People who are blaming BioWare for its downfall are unaware of how these types of practices are destroying the gaming industry. They’re naive if they think the decisions ruining their games are at the helm of the developers who go overworked and underpaid.
You can make art for the hell of it, and sink time and money doing it for the love of the art.
But if you want to make your money back, you have to make art people want to buy. That means figuring out what people want to buy and making art for those people. That's the "target".
And before you say "Just make good games", there are plenty of "good games" or even "good enough games" that don't sell enough. We like to think the artistic merit of the game is enough to sell the game, but that is not true at all.
Well untill a game studio figures out how to get it's employees to work for free than every game will be a product and target certain gamers so that they buy it
Opinions are subjective. That’s their definition. There is nothing factual or objective about opinions. All opinions are wrong due to their subjectivity, my own included.
You are lying if you say opinions are anything other than subjective.
Who the fuck do you think paid for all the churches, monuments, statues, bridges, plays, symphonies? It wasn't out of the goodness of the artist's hearts...
Unsubtantiation Andy
aww, look at you, watching influencers, are we? I'm no longer confused by your lack of education.
Corporate slop usually involves heavy influence from departments outside of the artistic process. Too many hands being where they shouldn't be. The art you're talking about is way different than the one being discussed here. I would expect a lowlife who is constantly hostile like you would lump that together like the savage that you are.
Does it? And how would an intellectual powerhouse like you know? You call things with zero corporate influence "corporate slop", and things virtually made by corporate committee for art, so I'm very confused about what you're trying to say beyond "I know fuck all"
What do any of us know other than you're a hostile troglodyte who doesn't want to have a conversation in a place for conversations. You're such hypocrite scum.
This point is always brought up but it’s such a simplified and elementary perspective of this concept. Yes, art, science, and engineering need financial backing. No one is denying that. The problem isn’t the existence of finance, it’s the desire for endless growth.
Before EA was acquired by PIS, it was a publicly traded company. A large part of it being owned by organizations like Blackrock and Vanguard, look into them, they own everything among a few others. They are vampires. When I say blaming BioWare is pointless, it’s because BioWare ceased to exist since 2007. BioWare was just a label at that point to appease the fan base (customer$) that EA (Blackrock, Vanguard) wanted to profit off of. Because that is what these types of companies do. They acquire, suck out every oz of soul from the company, try to sell to their loyal base of consumers, collecting their money, damaging the original brand until it’s time to shut down the company and make a nice profit for its shareholders.
This is not financial backing. This is greed, and it doesn’t stop at video games, it’s grocery stores, hospitals, clothing stores, general goods, movies, television, literature, recreation, just about every thing imaginable.
Look into Nikola Tesla, I recommend the episode on him by History Fix. The host is a former educator and gives a very detailed breakdown on his life and the conspiracy about his death. Sure, we need money to pay for things. But the line between necessity and exploitation is thin and constantly crossed by a very small group of people who have no interest in the lives of other humans.
Wow I had no idea blackrock and vanguard owned EA?! This makes a lot of sense and its terrifying to see just how many elements of the world they've got their fingers in, if not their whole damm hand
The belief that aspects core to civilization and humanity - to create art, to sing, dance, tell stories, and perform - should only be done by those with the greatest talent and at all points commodified is disgusting. It leads to a joyless, soulless, bland existence. We do these things because they bring joy, not to endeavor for wealth. Money at all costs is what’s making us all miserable misers.
Video games, film, and similar mediums have to some level of commodity to them to cover the big cost of creation. We shouldn’t accept maximizing profit for profits sake rather than trying to cover the costs of this cool thing made with passion if we want good entertainment.
Oh, BioWare deserves its fair share of blame, too. The staff who made the magic happen in the original DA/ME series are long gone. And even those games had notoriously terrible, crunch heavy development cycles before EA was involved with ownership.
After the controversial mess that was DA Veilguard, ME was the last intellectual property left standing. Unfortunately the new ME project has been in development literally since Andromeda dropped, over 9 years ago, and they've never had anything meaningful to show for it on N7 day. 9 straight years of disappointment, then going out with a whimper.
Yeah.
Everyone who thinks Bioware didn't had any larger internal issues is just delusional. The people who made the good games already left as you said.
The mindset inside these studios and many of the newer generation of developers is vastly different from what it was 15 years ago.
Back then you had a bunch of gamers just wanting to make games. Now you have employees wanting to shit their political and cultural into the games.
Yeah, no. Don't even need to try telling me the garbage dialogues of Trashguard are some executives fault. This is just developers being shit at their job.
You know it’s easy to do your research on the development history on Dragon Age 4, right? It’s started as a single player game that got forced into a multiplayer live service game by EA and then eventually back to single player and they gave the studio 6 months to come up with a game to ship out. It’s idiotic to try and try culture war bs on this.
The game sold 1.5 million copies and overall had a decent enough user and critic score. But that’s not enough for EA and is pennies when put up against the amount of micro transactions they sell.
glad to see someone recognize who actually owns this stuff. Despite certain narratives, Saudi Arabia actually owns like all of american media: entertainment, sports, news, social media platforms like Twitter/X, etc. SA expects returns on their investments, and that leads to all of these cut throat practices and consolidation.
I think it’s fundamentally flawed to turn this into a “Saudi Arabia vs America” thing. It’s not. It’s a capitalism thing. Making it about nations is missing the point, the American billionaire will exploit you the same as the Saudi Arabian billionaire
They're private equity, not venture capital. They acquire assets to strip them for parts while milking whatever revenue they can in the short term before the brand is ruined.
Woah woah woah, while it's true these guys look only at numbers for a lot of things, many numbers tell a fairly compelling story.
In Bioware's case, they were always in danger and everyone saw it coming from miles away. Anthem and Dragon Age: the Veilguard were both very expensive failures that took forever to make, made nowhere near the money they needed to break even, and the reasons were never on EA, they were on Bioware. Now WHY that is, is anyone's guess, but you just CANNOT have a decade of two incredibly expensive failures in this industry, one of which, straight-up carried a powerful brand name. The Veilguard was catastrophic, because EA actually had very low expectations, and the game couldn't even come close to that either.
It's abundantly clear, these aren't the Mass Effect guys. In fact, given what we know of their failures, a new Mass Effect would've unlikely been some blockbuster GOTY contender in 2031 or anything. Those people are long gone.
People who complain about Bioware (like myself) absolutely know how ass EA and the things they do are. Don't try to change the narrative as if people are just letting EA off the hook.
EA is 100% owned by Saudi Arabia. After they bought it, they loaded EA with a ton of debt from the purchase. So they will be shutting down more and what ever they need to, to cover that debt.
You could say that. So many redditors are bootlicking greedy corporations for their games like the new Gears of War. The people that say don't buy it are called grifters in this upside down place.
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u/Drippledrops 7h ago
They’re more venture capitalist than they are a gaming corporation at this point. I mean, the majority of their company is owned by Saudi Arabia. People who are blaming BioWare for its downfall are unaware of how these types of practices are destroying the gaming industry. They’re naive if they think the decisions ruining their games are at the helm of the developers who go overworked and underpaid.