bigdogchris
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EA ruins everything they touch. Bioware has been trash for years and it's sad to see another company ran into the ground by EA and shut down.
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Legendary Game Studio Bioware Shuts Down
- Thread starter bigdogchris
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EA ruins everything they touch. Bioware has been trash for years and it's sad to see another company ran into the ground by EA and shut down.
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Probably for the best - Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and the Mass Effect games were some of my favorites, but felt they've been in a spiral the past few years (decades?).
Flogger23m
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Shame, but I was not expecting much from Bioware going forward. Andromeda was okay but a big step back, and their last two games were flops. The only thing that did well in the last decade was Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Shame the new Mass Effect game is cancelled but probably would not have been good anyway.
Entirely expected. The brand was essentially a skin suit for talentless political activists and adult daycare employees just there to pretend to work while picking up a pay check. The amount of money they must have been burning through for negative return would have been insane. I would be surprised if more than 5-10% of the staff remained from the golden years.
I hope EA finds a good studio to outsource Mass Effect and Dragon Age to, and they bring in Drew Karpshyn to map out the stories. But I doubt that could happen since he's working at Archetype Entertainment now on the Mass Effect clone Exodus.
What he thought about Bioware when he left for the 2nd time.
I hope EA finds a good studio to outsource Mass Effect and Dragon Age to, and they bring in Drew Karpshyn to map out the stories. But I doubt that could happen since he's working at Archetype Entertainment now on the Mass Effect clone Exodus.
What he thought about Bioware when he left for the 2nd time.
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The activists got what they wanted. They cashed in until they killed the thing they clearly didn't like. I hope the people putting that type of employee into positions to destroy a company like that got hit the hardest in the pocketbook. Investing in the big game publishers at this point is just unwise.
Both are the result of a handful of people purposely killing the things we used to love for their own profit.
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ANTHEM had its issues but I would have liked a sequel. RIP
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A Saudi Arabia investment firm bought out EA on August 4, 2026 for $55 Billion. That likely has more to do with it than anything else. If you didn't like EA before, you'll LOVE the new EA.
M76
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That was quick. I expected they had time until at least the next mass effect. Guess it is not far enough in development to be worth finishing. Especially if it was to become another veilguard.
This is far more justified than most studios the old EA closed.
Based on the politics of their last few games.
"girls"
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That really sucks for the staff, EA forced a lot of truly shit ideas into the pipeline for this studio. Design by committee trash smothered ME Andromeda, Anthem, and the recent Dragon Age. Sad end for the studio that did Baldurs gate 1 & 2, Neverwinter Nights, Kotor, ME, Jade Empire, Dragon Age…
EA and Xbox (Studios) / MS are really on a generational run of squandering assets and good IPs.
EA and Xbox (Studios) / MS are really on a generational run of squandering assets and good IPs.
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DA2 way back in 2011 was the beginning of the end for them. ME3 was the only 'decent' game they released after that and even it wasn't as good as their earlier games.
M76
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DA2 catches a lot of hate, but if most games today were half as good as DA2 I'd be happy. Sure it recycled some maps, so did Mass Effect, why does that get a pass?
Gideon
Supreme [H]ardness
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Hopefully at some point another studio will pick up the IP and make better games with it.
Anthem, and Failguard were all BioWare.
Can’t blame EA for those.
EA threw money at BioWare and they didn’t get the results they needed.
BioWares weak leadership and a complete lack of vision killed BioWare.
EA just gets the blame.
EA was famous for giving the developers the rope to hang themselves with.
The studios they buy would get explosive scale ups to crank out sequels but I don’t know if you’ve met many developers but they tend to be terrible project managers.
So they do fantastic in a small team tight scope on a project they are passionate about.
But give them 5x the staff and things fall apart as they don’t have the skill set or personality to lead that sort of team.
Which leads to publishers bringing in “Team Leaders” but they have the wrong mind sets to work with most developers which inevitably forces out the people who made the thing initially. And what comes next is a husk of the thing you liked that got them purchased in the first place.
It’s a vicious cycle.
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Because the "new investors" probably see the studio as "tainted" and "beyond repair". Layoffs, to them, wouldn't scrub the taint in their eyes.
To EA, Bioware hasn't produced profit in over a decade. EA could have shrunk the studio down, but I guess decided simply cutting them loose removed risk. Bioware already burned through a lot of cash. There just isn't enough cash floating around these days for further risk. It's a sign of the times really. Given the circumstances, I don't view EA as the bad guy here despite their past reputation.
AAA games just cost too damned much.
Mad Maxx
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Mass Effect is my GOAT video gaming experience. Sad day, indeed, but not entirely unexpected.
Mass Effect is dead! Long live Mass Effect!
Mass Effect is dead! Long live Mass Effect!
Mad Maxx
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Criminally tragic!
Honestly, the Saudi's buying EA might be for the best. They will expect a return on their investments and won't put up with the woke crap. Woke, whether you agree with it or not, isn't a viable commercial strategy. This has been proven time and time again over the last decade. Even the rare exceptions don't do much to disprove the "go woke, go broke" saying. Games like God of War Ragnarok and the Last of Us 2 were less successful than their predecessors and most of the time, sequels to popular games do better than the originals. Not worse. And again, those are the success stories which all came out before the pattern was fully established and became so instantly recognizable.
BioWare has done nothing but release failure after failure for almost a full decade. It started with Mass Effect Andromeda under performing. Sure, it was profitable according to EA earnings calls but still fell well short of expectations. It was so successful that EA cancelled all future DLC plans for it. It fell short of its immediate predecessor too. Why? Two reasons actually. Wokeness and broken trust with the fans who hated the ending to ME3. Anthem came out, and though woke wasn't the reason for its failure, mismanagement, poor direction and broken promises were. It was a game that had some potential, but wasn't good enough in the state it released in. EA reportedly even gave BioWare a full year to get the game into shape and show them progress and if it liked what it saw, would fully fund the "Anthem 2.0" project as they put it. That didn't happen. When that deadline came and went, the higher ups didn't think that year of reworking the game bore enough fruit to proceed and it cut its losses then.
Frankly, BioWare wasn't the right studio for the project to begin with and it showed. It's a studio known for its single player RPG's. Making an online, live service Destiny clone wasn't really in its wheelhouse. Then you had nothing for almost a decade, then it shat out Dragon Age the Veilguard. Which also failed miserably.
The studio only had 50 people or less working there. The studio hasn't produced a successful new game in over a decade. Their last hit was released in December 2012 and even that was controversial due to the crap ending. It's one success since then was a remaster of the Mass Effect trilogy in 2021. Andromeda failed to meet expectations, Anthem flopped miserably, Dragon Age the Veilguard flopped miserably and after six fucking years of development, ME5 was still in "early development". That screams gross mismanagement and incompetence. The studio wasn't worth saving. What it had for ME5 probably wasn't worth saving. We know some of the Dragon Age Veilguard team that survived the culling after that game failed were moved to the Mass Effect team. That says it all right there.
All the people that made the classics we all love from BioWare have already moved on and did so years ago. The BioWare people that made the studio what it was have been leaving since the EA acquisition during the Mass Effect 2 days. Either they did form new studios or they are working for other studios already. What was left at BioWare doesn't have the chops to form their own studio and succeed. That should be painfully obvious.
BioWare has done nothing but bleed EA like a parasite for more than a decade now. What EA shut down today isn't the BioWare we all have fond memories of. It's a corpse that was paraded around "Weekend at Bernie's" style.
A little work with a thesaurus, and I have a great idea for a new series, Volume Impact.
Based on my Google-Fu and an assortment of Internet Lawyers, I am relatively sure it is legally distinct from Mass Effect....
Featuring our protagonist, Commandant Drover.
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Sounds like AI slop to me. Ship it!
I'm pretty sure that the slop AI shits out would still have a better story and dialogue than anything the husk of BioWare was capable of producing, given they considered Failguard to be a masterpiece.
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Maybe I'm old school, but I like my U.S. companies being owned by U.S. citizens, and not a foreign investment firm from a country that has Sharia law and doesn't have to pay U.S. taxes.
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“EA Cuts 400 Jobs, Shelves a Sims Project and Shrinks the skate. Team
by DrUsmanSaleem Today, 16:02 Discuss (5 Comments)EA's restructuring goes well beyond the BioWare shutdown. The company is laying off around 400 people, roughly 3% of its workforce, according to an internal memo from executives David Tinson and Cam Weber, reported by Bloomberg. About 50 of those jobs were tied to the now-canceled new Mass Effect game. The Sims is hit as well, with EA pausing a project codenamed "Project Lotus" to move resources to another one called "Project Evergreen." Several reports describe Lotus as canceled outright. Full Circle, the studio behind skate., is being cut down to what the memo calls a smaller, more focused team, even though EA says the game has done well since it entered early access in September 2025. The same team already went through layoffs earlier this year.
Some projects are getting more attention, however. Respawn and DICE are working together on a new shooter, which Variety's sources say is Star Wars: Battlefront 3. Battlefield, Apex Legends, Motive's Iron Man game, and the next Star Wars Jedi title all continue, and Fight Night is apparently making a comeback. The memo says these decisions came after a months-long hard look at the business. However, we also know that the layoffs are coming a few months after EA went private in a $55 billion buyout led by Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, a deal that reportedly left the company with around $20 billion in debt. EA says it will share more about its projects over the coming months.“
Says it all. Especially the blue-hair in the front.
Sounds like they are focused on the right stuff.
True. Isn't it ironic that wokeness sent it to a country that's the complete opposite?
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Some of my fondest video game memories were from Bioware games 
I'm not so wound up on games coming from US companies. My current favorite dev is Polish - CDPR. Lots of good stuff out of Europe and Japan over the years. The problem with Saudi ownership is they're going to mess up anything that doesn't comport with their viewpoints. Or just sell it. Hopefully sell it.
The Saudi's bought EA for their massive sports games portfolio. I'm not surprised to see them dumping other IPs. The Saudis are going to divest all the "non-Sharia" IPs. Hopefully they're greedy enough to sell them to western or Japanese devs rather than just bury them.
I don't think I'll miss Bioware in it's current state. Bioware has been on a downhill slide since they sold out to EA in 2007. I'd rather have seen them sell/license the rights to make a new Mass Effect game than have EA make it even before the Saudis took over. Larian did a great job with Baldur's Gate 3. I'd like to see more of that with old Bioware IPs.
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I get where you are coming from on that. That said....
What I want are games that are designed to be fun experiences and not lectures on identity politics.
Flogger23m
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Some of the talented people are working on Exodus. The rest are probably not worth keeping around, or will be moved elsewhere in EA if that is an option. Lets be honest, Bioware hasn't put out anything good in a long time. Their last two games were massive flops. Their only hope was a new ME game but I think that was too far off and it was deemed too risky to wait and see if it was going to be passable. And let us be honest, do you think a new ME game from 2026-29 Bioware would be good?
This. Much of what EA has done started long before "wokeness". EA has tried to get its studios to take on crazy endeavors that in each rendition has ended up being bad. SimCity 2013, which I bought, was horrible because EA wanted the always online component. When that didn't work they killed SimTower 2 which was in development and ended up being picked up by a Japanese developer.
Generally I believe companies are buying IPs so that AI development can take the place of human development.
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