Because the IPs fuckin suck under the studio. Nobody cares about Anthem. Andromeda was a mid cashout of Mass Effect. Lord knows wtf they were going to do with Dragon Age. Few, if any people, like these IPs as they are; you like the promise they once held, because you forgot the one rule to responsibly engage with fiction: Good stories get to end. The games still exist. They'll always exist, or at least as long as you or I are alive. Thus the IP always exists. What goes away is the studio, which, OK, bye

Electronic Arts in the 1980s was amazing.

Yeah, exactly what we expected to happen when Saudis bought it.

Saudis are Islamic, there are no pride parades in Saudi Arabia. There will be no more "secular" games from Electronic Arts, so somehow EA has found a way to suck even more.

The Saudis are an embarrassing US ally, not even getting into the royal family. They're no better than Iran in my opinion.

I can understand doing business with them, I think trade is the best way to open doors and find common ground. But an ally?

It's against my religion.

I am still kind of interested how long the sims will still exist in its current form under the new leadership

So we have an official end-state for SWTOR?

That would solve nothing.

😎 real gamer detected

We have to just vote soulless corposuits out with our wallets. Too many business majors telling devs what to do.

Game companies really smarted up when they made gamers care more about the company behind the games than of the creative and technical people that actually create the games.

Memes from the Anthem days were prophetic.

Anthem had some of the most innovative and fun core gameplay of any AAA in the last 2 decades. The issue was there was nothing else, it was essentially a prologue that just suddenly ended. It's also an interesting case because the good part of that game (flight) was an idea forced by a CEO or some useless fuck like that.

For real. At this point it's like, what's the common denominator here? It's also nuts because they keep doing the same bullshit and wonder why they keep losing money and getting bad PR. They are so out of touch with reality.

More micro transactions probably

The IPs were created in a specific environment, with a specific set of people coming together to make them. Sure, others can join and create things of the same quality if the same environment is still present. But after so many years the minds these the IPs spawned from have almost all long since moved on or fill other roles. So if the current owners of the IP have no respect for it, dont care, etc. There's zero reason to still remain invested after its shown they cant live up to the quality and promise of the original creators.

EA was a good game company. I don't like them as a law firm.

Considering they hamstrung Anthem with no support and killed it shortly after release, I was surprised to see it on the list.

Man that was a great game with incredible potential but they (EA) shit the bed by forcing a release before it was ready and then pulling the plug just as the game was getting in a really good place after a roxky start.

They just won't make The Sims.

The Saudis won't touch it or anything like it. They have the death penalty for adultery, The Sims is unacceptable (at least, the sims that we know).

They might have a Sharia Law version where the fully-covered women juggle raising children and making meals to please their husband.

They will make games for their market (and China).

Sims is a US-market-game that is against Islamic law.

Instead, they can make FIFA and other sports games and shooters. I doubt they'll even make RPGs as we know them, Baldur's Gate 3 for example would not be made in a Saudi studio.

For Bioware, no. It's too late for them. For the future, it'd prevent companies like EA buying up every half-successful dev company and feeding their IP into the machine to milk our nostalgia for profit.

Vote with your wallet is mostly a scam. You can't buy what isn't there. Devs are too reliant on the business freaks to turn their art into money. I don't have a good solution. All I can think of is maybe something like a registered not-for-profit version of steam/GOG/itch. No investors expecting a return allowed. No for-profit company that owns the not-for-profit as a bypass. Just a system devs can use to turn art into money with no BS about ensuring profits for someone else. I don't have the devops/software engineering knowledge to make that happen, but I hope someone does.

But it wouldn't prevent them from buying the IP. The only thing that solves the problem is preventing ip from changing hands, but that would definitely cause problems

It would reduce it, at least. Part of what makes those deals appealing to devs is the idea that the umbrella corporation will handle the business so the devs can do the dev work they love. Many of them would be much more reluctant to sell off ownership of their concepts and work entirely, and the ubrella corps would find it harder to milk nostalgia when they've only bought the name and not any of the creative team that made it real. Not impossible, but harder.

And most of these legendary devs worked so hard for so long for such a small paycheck and zero benefits just to get layed off when it conveniences the studio

So glad you feel entitled to tell me how to feel about my own opinions 🤣

If buying a company is illegal, there's still no (practical) way to prevent the buying company say, "we'll put you in your own separate Bioware team, no management changes for at least a year, we'll hire anyone who wants to come over" etc. Basically, you'd have the exact same situation practically, just the legal bollocks would be different and it'd be slightly less convenient.

Man I miss when the "pick your color" ending for ME3 was controversial because the trilogy was so beloved that anything but a momunental ending wouldn't feel like enough.

The trilogy still was awesome and I still like the debates about the choices in that game!

I remember vagualy enjoying playing ME:A but I, for the life of me, do not remember what it was about. I can how ever debate decisions I made in ME:1 lol

It had good bones just didn't get fleshed out in the writing to me. Neither the characters nor the lore grabbed me enough. I think I even beat it, but again i couldn't really tell you if that's true or not

Honestly hope the good devs just join the growing trend of worker owned game studios and start up anew without all the baggage.

Good. So much of adjusting people's behaviour is just making it more convenient to do the right thing and less convenient to do the wrong thing. It's impossible to get people to behave perfectly all the time, but the more inconvenient you make it to do the wrong thing, the more the human tendency toward laziness will keep them passively on the right path. There are no desire paths in a hedge maze.

But it will also make legit things slightly less convenient.

How?

Same way it makes this negative thing more inconvenient - there are legit reasons for a company to own another one, because it basically just helps organisation and accounting.

What legit reasons? Seriously. What real world situations are there where allowing companies to own companies promotes a healthy society/economy/etc.? (Not just benefitting the shareholders, and not just the accountants. That's not enough.)

Well not allowing it is just an inconvenience, as I said, so it's really a benefit for the accountants in this comparison. But if you're saying that has a big effect on discouraging the harmful form of ownership, the innocuous forms would be discouraged as well. That means also companies would be less likely to merge at all (regardless of resulting struxture) which would be unhealthy for the economy as it prevents synergising. But for the record I don't think it would have a massive effect on either case.