Prince Valiant
Gawd
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Yes, they were. When key staff leave and there are no successors in place it's nothing but a name. Better they all die in such cases.
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Legendary Game Studio Bioware Shuts Down
- Thread starter bigdogchris
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Gorankar
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The Bioware that made great games that I loved has been dead for quite a while. What happened to it sucks, but I've already mourned the real Bioware, and it is difficult for me to be overly sad the dried out husk of a thing wearing it's skin is now finally dead as well. It's almost a kindness at this point. Though I am sorry about the hard working people now looking for work in an industry doing everything it can to replace or outsource as many of their jobs as it can with AI or 3rd world sweatshops.
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"Cash-Strapped EA Could Sell Off Mass Effect and Other IPs To Recoup Costs
by Cpt.Jank Today, 19:12 Discuss (2 Comments)Electronic Arts recently announced that it is shuttering BioWare and cancelling its upcoming Mass Effect game and cutting 400 jobs in the process, after the gaming giant acquired the game studio in 2007. According to a former executive producer at BioWare, Mark Darrah, however, there may still be hope for fans of BioWare's myriad beloved franchises, including Mass Effect.
And this is where AI comes in and creates the game with minimal staff. Will it suck? Absolutely. Will people care? Probably not.
not for an established studio with multiple blockbuster games on their resume...Rocksteady was not some startup company, they deserved the benefit of the doubt but the departures of co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker was the beginning of the end
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And all it took was a shitty game with a few hundre millions losses....you are still in denial.
Go woke, go broke is a hard concept for you eh?
If Bioware had not sold out to EA, the company would have closed down. They spent waaaaaaay too much money making SW:TOR and didn't have nearly enough to finish and release. The options were sell out or go bankrupt.
Yes, it can be the case for any studio. One big flop can close down a studio easily. Game developers aren't sitting on piles of cash. They're typically borrowing money to make games and borrowing power is mostly based on the last thing you put out. Flop one game badly enough and the studio is gone. Not only is the company not going to make back the money to pay off the loans, the company's credit drops through the floor and can't borrow more money to continue to function. This is the way it should work since it mostly keeps budgets and plans within reasonable ranges.
It's only the past ten years that western developers have been going full retard on budgets and stupidity. They've been given money or really sweet loans but with certain strings attached. Those strings almost always require loss of narrative control and specific politics and ideology injected into the game no matter how antithetical it is to the core of the game or story. I'm glad that the companies who were doing this are closing. It means this trash will be produced much less and we have an actual chance for the western gaming industry to go back to what it used to do: make games that gamers want to play and buy. Eastern game studios have not had an issue making games people want to play and buy.
If every AAA game studio shut down I wouldn't shed a tear. They're well past the point of being relevant or good. Let the AA game studios step into their place and give us what most of us want. Sure, they'll end up turning into AAA studios and screw up just like the current ones have but the cycle can again repeat and they can be replaced by the new AA studios who sprang up to make good games again.
Whining about current AAA studios closing down is stupid. They created the problems which are getting them shut down. They deserve to fail. Protecting them so they can make more worthless games no one wants doesn't help anyone.
You have zero idea how finance works in the video gaming industry. When companies can't secure third party financing (which usually comes with strings attached), then they have to foot the bill themselves. Studios sometimes have to operate for YEARS in between releases with no real income during that time. Costs go up, and BTW, it costs a lot to operate a studio. It takes a lot of computer hardware, server infrastructure, and most importantly, a lot of man hours to develop a game. Add corporate bloat into the mix and things get much, much worse. A single bad game costing hundreds of millions of dollars absolutely puts a studio in danger of insolvency. It's happened countless times in the video game industry already.
Star Wars the Old Republic cost over 200 million dollars and took more than five years to develop. At the time it was released, it was the most expensive video game ever made. It's widely known that the game was massively overbudget and took far longer to develop than was anticipated. Even without adjusting for inflation, that's a bloated budget. BioWare had to sell to keep the studio afloat and it was a successful studio at the time. Fast forward to today, it lost over 100 million dollars on Anthem. It barely broke even on Andromeda. Dragon Age the Veilguard took a decade to make and cost around 250-300m. Keep in mind, it didn't even sell 1.5 million copies. It had 1.5 million players engage with the content. That counts Gamepass access. It would have needed 4 to 5 million copies sold to break even, much less make money. Again, not all of the money from those sales goes back to the developer. Meaning, the game probably made somewhere around 60 to 80 million dollars if we are being generous. Against a budget of 250 to 300 million, that game grossly under performed.
And for the last six years, the Mass Effect team (roughly 50 people, probably less before Veilguard), cost the company millions of dollars in salaries, not to mention equipment and infrastructure costs and basically had nothing to show for the time or money spent.
Bungie had to do the same thing. It spent over 200 million dollars on crap like a new office building no one used and spent more than 150 million dollars prototyping games that didn't go anywhere and will never see the light of day. Then, on the verge of insolvency, (due to Destiny's downturn due to mismanagement of that), they sold out to Sony. You know the rest. Firewalk was spun off from ProbablyMonsters, which was a successful studio and it was purchased by Sony for an undisclosed sum. Then almost half a billion dollars was invested in Concord's development. After 8 years and half a billion bucks, the game went over like a wet fart in an elevator.
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I'm going to assume the synopsis is.....
"Follow a spectre travel across the universe, on a mission to find the person that misgendered them on twitter."
/s
Some people want to believe that wokeism is what killed BioWare. It's not, far from it. Microsoft in particular has killed fully profitable studios. It's been the biggest beef within the industry with regards to how Microsoft runs things for years. EA is no different. The acquisition of EA was done via leveraged buyout meaning that in order to purchase the combined company, it required the company to take on debt and lots of it due to the loans that the consortium needed to buy the asset. Studios that were more or less financially solvent are being killed off in order to pay for the acquisition.
From what I can gather its the IPs they want. However, many of these business people do not know how development works.
Developers are not all contracted, there's core developers, designers, testers, etc in just about every development studio. You need a core team because things differ between each development team. How things are laid out, where they are, software, mechanisms for localization is all different. However, with AI there's a group of people who think they can recreate software with AI. While it's possible it's far more difficult than office software. We shall see if they can pull it off.
When the product you make is so bad, you need to force people to pay for it.
Canadian politician calls on government to help BioWare employees buy the studio and run it themselves
Canadian politician calls on government to help BioWare employees buy the studio and run it themselves
M76
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Every CEO is the worst, that's the only way to get into such positions. Being ruthless and indifferent to the work / art itself.
But that is exactly the point. They ask and the answer is always: we didn't go far enough, we need to own the chuds some more.
Oh man, one of the comments mentioned Alice. It would be huge to me if American McGee got his baby back and let him continue the story. He already tried to buy it back once but that was the time when EA was still a juggernaut that would rather hoard IP's and do nothing with them rather than let them loose, all because they do not want competition so no deal. Now the situation might be different.
M76
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The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command
I experience it first hand. Sure if you want to be pedantic, then wokeism didn't kill bioware. Wokeism killed the quality of their games, which in turn killed their sales, which prompted EA to pull the plug on them. Many such cases.
Do you mean ninja-theory? There is no word on whether they were actually profitable. Senua2's sales were meager even compared to the mild success of the first game.
How does killing solvent studios help with debt? If they are only after assets then the first thing they should kill is studios operating at a loss, which increases debt. Bioware clearly was such a studio for a long time. Veilguard was supposed to pay the debt they incurred since their last successful game, which Anthem clearly wasn't. Bioware has been likely EA's loss leader for a long time, only kept around due to their historic significance. Which the new investors clearly don't give a damn about. And good riddance too. Game studios that don't make good games should be dissolved.
No they don't, that's why they are business people not developers. You don't hire a developer to be an accountant.
Bioware had a core team, much more than a core team, halo studios also did, rocksteady did too, the coalition also has one. Didn't help them much, did it?
I remember being so annoyed at the repeat dungeons in DA2 that I bailed like half way though the game and never finished it
Like great here's the same dungeon for the 7th time but it's mirrored now
That game absolutely sucked
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I was never a big fan of Bioware. I worked on their Jade Empire game at Microsoft. I didn't think it was a great game, but many people say otherwise. KOTOR was the same for me. Their actual gameplay was always meh. It always felt like they spent more time on branching storylines, which eventually gets old, and doesn't really change the gameplay. Fine, you're more good now, or more evil, and dialogue or cutscenes change, but the gameplay itself didn't change much.
I wouldn't compare BioWare to Ferrari. I would compare BioWare to Jaguar circa 2024 "Copy Nothing" ad campaign, where Jaguar's customers were left looking at the "new image" the company was trying to push and collectively said "WTF are you doing to that brand? Who is this for?".
Great analogy. We remember what was, and got a look at what it is now and were all wondering WTF is this?
The concept of accountability eludes you doesn't it?
I'm certain you don't understand what's really going on here. I seriously don't know why I try, but here it goes: The BioWare that made all those great games of yesteryear doesn't exist anymore. It's the people that made the studio what it was and they are ALL gone now. Either they were consumed by the woke mind virus (Patrick Weeks) or moved onto other projects. Guys like Casey Hudson and Mac Walters, Drew Karpyshyn and others are working at other studios right now. BioWare is just a name. It's a simple trademark owned by EA. Sure, there was a time when that logo inspired confidence that you were in for a great gaming experience, but that hasn't been the case since Andromeda disappointed so many of us in 2017. Even ME3, as good as it is, broke the trust that BioWare had earned with its customers. EA's interference was very clear in that game and it suffered from that interference.
The BioWare that made Dragon Age: the Veilguard is a bunch of mentally ill retards that can't figure out what bathroom to use who wore the BioWare name like an Edgar suit. That BioWare's end was well deserved and long overdue.
d3athf1sh
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so if Dragon Age: The Veilgaurd would have been a massive success do you think they would still have closed down the studio? because we all know what ruined that game.
The team that made it one of the all time greats is long gone. We should be cheering the closure of studios that are so far beyond what they once were and have no idea what their core customer wants because it will hopefully incite the management of other studios to do a post-mortem and say "you know, maybe we'll all be out of a job as well if we continue to focus on gender politics and "owning the chuds" rather than making video games people want to buy and play". The more this happens, the more likely we're going to get better games down the road.
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Who gives a shit if they’re gone. The talent that made DAO, KOTOR, and ME1-2 have been gone for over a decade. EA could easily make a new BioWare with new talent and management now that they’ve cleared house and it would likely produce better games.
I’m just glad we got ME Legendary edition. They didn’t totally fuck that one up and at least it preserved the games at 4k/60.
I’m just glad we got ME Legendary edition. They didn’t totally fuck that one up and at least it preserved the games at 4k/60.
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You mean "Woke"? Woke has been around for over 10 years now, and despite all the hate on the other end of the spectrum, it's likely not going to go away. There's plenty of successful "Woke" games, like Cyberpunk2077 and Baldur's Gate III. I don't care what puts another guy's panties in a bunch, if the game is fun to play, the game is good. It's largely the same for the MAJORITY of the people who play games. If "Woke" people don't play games because it's not "Woke" enough, or if "Anti-Woke" people don't play games because it's not "Anti-Woke" enough, then vote with your wallet. The rest of us don't really care, we're just tired of all of y'all whining about it.
Woke is not what killed the studio by itself. But lets not kid ourselves, wokeness is practically a poison pill for movies and games at this point. That said, mismanagement by EA and BioWare internally has been the core problem with BioWare. It's not just the content of the games but poorly managed projects taking too long and going way over budget that's partly to blame. This has been going on since before the acquisition of BioWare by EA. In fact, SWTOR's messy development is probably the core reason it sold out to EA in the first place. ME3 was mismanaged and rushed out the door. Since then, it's been more mismanaged projects going over budget, over promising and underdelivering.
Wokeness did hurt Andromeda, but not as bad as the game's initial quality. It was also the early days of woke when it wasn't as egregiously fatal to a game's success as it generally is today. Andromeda's bigger issues come down to project mismanagement. We know that the game was really built in 18 months despite taking 6 years to develop. The game was rushed, and the poor animations and massive bug list were a result of that. The game still wouldn't have ever found the success of the trilogy games, because of wokeness and because the Ryder protagonists were boring, bland and ultimately forgettable compared to Shepard. Shepard was larger than life regardless of your choices. BioWare had no business working on something like Anthem. It wasted its best team on that, put the B team on Mass Effect Andromeda, which isn't what that team was good at. If anything, they should have reversed the teams for those two games. Combat is what the Andromeda team excelled at. (They made ME3's multiplayer).
I can go on but the short version is, that I agree. Woke by itself didn't kill the studio. I think it killed Dragon Age the Veilguard specifically. But BioWare earned its fate with its overall performance post Dragon Age III. It even made missteps before that with DA II, SWTOR, etc.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn't woke. I am not sure where you are getting that. Being able to put dicks on chicks and clams on dudes isn't by itself, woke. Baldur's Gate III made a lot of that stuff optional, and wasn't in your face about it.
Simply having gay, lesbian or bisexual characters in a game doesn't make the game woke. I'm not sure how many times this needs to be explained.
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Good, there should be more LGBTQ+ characters in games, since that's not woke.
Completely disagree. All this woke trash must die a very public death and something new/better rise from the ashes.
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Completely agree. We finally have an administration where minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ aren't in positions of power.
/s
DukenukemX
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If you have to wonder why BioWare is being shut down.
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M76
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Strawman argument, nobody says wokeism can be the only reason for a game being worse quality. Especially not in 2010, since woke influence only started to become a serious issue after 2015.
If Veilguard was half as good as DA2, it would've probably sold enough to not bring down bioware.
DA:I and ME:A were still relatively good compared to Veilguard, even if they had serious issues.
M76
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This is what the woke apologists do best: Pretending to not understand the problem, and drawing false equivalences.
"If Tomb Raider came out today it would be called woke" "Ellen Ripley would be called woke" "Aliens is woke" etc. I've heard them all, yes even the ones claiming BG3 is woke.
Excellent example of missing the point.
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Maybe if this were the late 1700's, I'd give you the courtesy of calling you a good sir, but being called a woke apologists from a whiny cur prevents the likelihood of me doing so.
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Supporters of normalizing mental illness tend to do that. Just make games and leave the cultural/political issues to another medium. I don't play games that want to preach their garbage.
There's not much daylight between "You will be made to care" and "a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
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I'm not going to have a discussion with someone who's being deliberately obtuse. Either you know what we're talking about and you're being deliberately obtuse, or you're trying to stir up trouble, and I'm not going to entertain either scenario.
But thanks for your efforts to disrupt the thread.