Yes, I'm sure THAT'S the reason, and not that Bioware has been dead in the water for 12 years at minimum

Bioware was already rotting in the mass grave where formerly successful studios they bought spend their last days being milked of any remaining collective goodwill in the gaming zeitgeist before being summarily executed.

This was just them posting the obituary we all knew was coming.

I mean BioWare has been a disaster for like a decade now, hasn't it?

2007: Mass Effect. BioWare acquired by EA.

2009: Dragon Age: Origins

2010: Mass Effect 2

2011: Dragon Age II (not AS loved as the first one, but still fun game, just a bit repetitive; Good reviews, great sales), SWTOR

2012: Mass Effect 3; The two remaining cofounders resign (the first one dropped off earlier to get back to her medical practice, apparently all 3 founders were fresh med school grads when they started).

2014: Dragon Age: Inquisition; Not my cup of tea, but sales disagree, BioWare's best selling game (definitely at that point, but possibly still?).

2017: Mass Effect: Andromeda; Sales still strong, but critical reception bad. A lot of people dislike it. Feels rushed, like a cheap "hey we own this IP, let's make a game unrelated to the previous ones" game. They really backed themselves into a corner with the ending of ME3 and at this point a prequel would've done better, but not an unrelated sequel in another galaxy.

2019: Anthem. Live service bullshit. Sold well, but not as well as previous BW games. Abandoned after 2 years, but they continued selling in-game currency after stopping work on the game.

2021: Mass Effect remaster

2025: DA Veilguard. Well received, but sold poorly. Under half of the expected sales. Review bombed on some platforms for being "woke", but that's probably irrelevant given it started off "mostly positive" on Steam that requires you to actually play the game before reviewing it. Dropped the whole "your decisions from previous games influence the world" thing BioWare used to have. Explain all the mysterious lore and suddenly everything is simple and straight-forward...

They used to drop literal gold every 2 years or so on average. Now 6 years between two actually new games and quality seems to be dropping. The original people who made BioWare what it was are mostly gone, all of the founders long gone.

This while EA Games has actually been fairly hands-off with their studios. Respawn has been creating single-player games and has another one in the works. Those have no post-launch monetization whatsoever.

But anyway, EA was used as a vehicle to drop a bunch of debt into. I don't think any of their studios are going to be doing great by the time the decade's over.

As an FYI, I've been having a blast with Tempest Rising, it's not exactly like Red Alert but it's definitely got that old school C&C vibe to it.

The T stands for Trump!

Who actually is a gamer himself too

Apparently day 1 of Firefly filming he told Alan Tudyk to go buy an Xbox so they could play Halo. Day 2 he asked Alan "so what'd you think" and Alan was confused, having thought it to be a joke. That day he had to go and buy said Xbox.

I'm listening to their podcast (Once We Were Spacemen) right now, though the episode where they talked about how they became friends was ages ago, so I might be misremembering some details. They also have an episode with the guy who directed the Uncharted fan film Nathan starred in, Allan Ungar.

I'd not heard of an Expanse game. I hope it features Shohreh Aghdashloo. I fucking love that woman.

Mass Effect Citadel DLC was the final good product that Bioware made. It's oddly prescient.

Been a damn good ride.

Calling those games unc slop is laughable, considering the comparative quality of modern games.

Fuck Jade Empire is such a good game.

They had at least one T.

I second that. Frank Klepacki delivered some very good tracks on that title too!

that, is exactly it.

Eh... It was written on the wall 12 years ago when EA bought Bioware.

I'd love to see Microsoft buy EA, then close it

Perhaps they can make a game about dismembering journalists.

Or EA buy XBOX and close it. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)

That works too!

EA was bought by the Saudis along with Trump's son-in-law. This Bioware closure likely isn't the first we'll see.

That was my last experience with the Mass Effect setting and it felt like a very appropriate sendoff.

I was initially looking forward to Andromeda, but I'm glad I waited for the reviews. I would have been disappointed if that was my last Mass Effect experience.

Apparently day 1 of Firefly filming he told Alan Tudyk to go buy an Xbox so they could play Halo. Day 2 he asked Alan "so what'd you think" and Alan was confused, having thought it to be a joke. That day he had to go and buy said Xbox.

And then both of them ended up in Halo as Buck and Mickey in ODST.

I just replayed all of the mass effect games and dragonage games about a year or 2 ago, once Saudi Arabia bought EA I was like, welp, there goes that. (PIF can suck my DIF)

Now with Bioware being closed, glimmer of hope a new powerhouse independent studio pops up.

Which I did not know or remember from the podcast (though they may have mentioned it) because I've never played Halo myself :( Never been a console gamer unfortunately. Though protondb lists Master Chief Collection as Gold status so I may yet get to play it, it just happened that it came to PC when I was already an adult with little time for vidya :( Then by the time I got into my career enough that I didn't worry about hitting 8 hours a day in the office to stay employed, I'd forgotten it existed again. Aaand now I have new reasons for not having enough time for playing as much vidya as I'd like.

I suspected this would happen after the Saudi take-over. I haven't played Veilguard, but i did see something about a non-binary character. I'd be very surprised if the saudi's funded something progressive like that, even if it was poorly executed from what i've seen.

Gen Z really is the saddest generation.

Sounds like EA is doubling down on live service games, Star Wars and sports. Not surprising, the industry has been moving away from the big AAA single player game culture for a long time. That might end up being an era that was linited to Millennials.

Anthem was discontinued after like a month. They kept the servers open but gave up pretty much right away.

Which is a shame, because the gameplay was fucking tight as hell. I loved that game. It could have been the next Destiny if they'd just kept it around long enough. The only reason it was received so poorly in the first place was because the internet hate machine didn't have enough fodder that month.

Ah, I didn't know about that one because I could never get into Inquisition myself. Though it seems to have been well received enough as a game that perhaps I should try it.

Part of me wonders if Krem received less hate than some other Ts in media because the Internet hate machine mostly seems to have it out for MTF rather than FTM folks or because he genuinely had good writing rather than being shoehorned in

Typically MTFs are seen as "misogynistic perverts" and FTMs are seen as "misunderstood lesbians"

Neither are an accurate picture but one is far easier to sympathize with.

Uh... You've met boomers before, right!?

And the fans rejoiced over the closing of a game studio they didn't interact with for decades anyway.

Get fucked, all of you.

i keep having trouble with this because most of the people in my newest band are boomers. i have to remind myself that i'm very fortunate to find people who don't fit stereotypes

they could buy steam instead and close it 😃😃 what whys everyone looking at me like that

So I guess this means that we'll never get that KotOR remake then...

from the article:

It wasn’t always plain sailing for the families afterwards – kids don’t run away from happy homes – but maybe things had changed when they went back or they were older and able to cope better.

i don't know the specifics, but that sounds like what they're trying to say very gently. i wouldn't go so far as to say it ruined their lives, but in our experiences (two of my cousins and one niece ran away when they were teenagers) if their lives were ruined it was the shit that caused them to run away that did it.

i know, small sample size, but most people expect their lives to be ordinary. it makes it easy to fall into the logical trap that everyone has the same experiences

Honestly, is Andromeda worth playing? That’s the only one I haven’t finished but do have it downloaded

So much better game experience, but nowhere near the cash cow of people blowing money on cosmetics in live service games and pay to win. Even super low effort mobile games will frequently milk out way more cash.

Basically the good money is with low quality content, so good quality has to come out of enthusiasm for gaming, not from board rooms.

Good lord everything EA touches turns to shit. Mass Effect is one of my all time favorite series and I credit it with breaking me out of just playing JRPGs. I was really looking forward to the next entry in the series, but the trilogy (there is no Andromeda in Ba Sing Se) will always be in my top games of all time and has enough of a conclusion to leave me satisfied

Well now I'm definitely getting it!

You didn't like Generals?! /s

Good, MDK2 was the last good game they put out.

They don't care. That kind of thing would be censored locally but as long as it makes them money, it doesn't matter.

Thanks for the memories!

I remember saying this when they were acquired and Anthem wasn't even a sperm in Daddy EA yet.

oh no… what a surprise… ea shuts down a studio they aquired…

They closed studios they acquired since they started acquiring game studios…

I'm guessing ME4 looked more like ME:A or Anthem than ME1/2.

Maybe it just needed a few patches,

I don't think you patch out the idea of 'exploring a new galaxy except someone else already did all the exploration for you'

For letting them have free reign and them squandering it?

BioWare did this entirely to themselves.

They had announced their next game. I find it just a little curious that it happened now, so soon after de deal was finalised.