They don't. Especially since former Bioware senior leadership have posted Youtube videos explicitly saying they were the ones who pushed to make Dragon Age a live service, not EA.
Check out Mark Darrah's youtube channel where he talks about the mess that was DA 4's development. It gives some really good insights on just how little direction Bioware's senior leadership had with their decision making, and how surprisingly little influence EA had on it.
I know everyone wants to make EA out to be the villain of the story, because they absolutely are majority of the time. But they really had little hand in Bioware's bizarre downward trajectory.
I concur that, from all the information I can find online, BioWare seems to have been a mess for a long time, if not from the beginning, and that things probably just worked out for a while by luck. Apparently, they used to rely heavily on brutal crunch times, had terrible/aimless leadership, and a toxic studio culture. Tbf, they also made their biggest hits at a time when there simply wasn't as much competition. And while I absolutely love the original ME trilogy, it's (at least to me) great mainly for its vision rather than gameplay, which is something you get mainly due to having amazing writers and/or directors. Meaning it's far less tied to a whole studio than to a very few specific individuals - and if they choose to leave, the biggest strength is gone.
BW leadership just seemed bizarrely out of touch. I remember when DA2 came out and people were (rightfully) complaining about the direction of the series. Senior BW leaders, especially Mike Laidlaw, were extremely arrogant and condescending. Like, they could not believe we weren't buying the "awesome-button" spiel. Same thing with ME3's ending and Casey being convinced it was the most brilliant thing ever.
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u/meatballranger 8h ago
Bioware leadership is to blame far more than EA