r/videogames • u/Dhenn004 • 9h ago

News / Trailers / Articles Bioware is dead

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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.

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u/Dhenn004 8h ago

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

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u/Mantiquirk 8h ago

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.

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u/Mundane-Opinion-4903 8h ago

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

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u/Mantiquirk 8h ago

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.

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u/I_travel_ze_world 5h ago

They previously made Star Wars The Old Republic MMO.. a live service game wasn't outside their past experience.

hell I was playing Neverwinter Nights multiplayer in 2002.. Bioware was never a single player only studio.

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u/Mantiquirk 4h ago

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.

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u/I_travel_ze_world 3h ago

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.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

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.