Arabia-shmarabia. EA would burn and shit everything around anyway even without SA.

God forbid they would do something with a story.

RIP BioWare, you will be missed.

"Saudis EAt Shit."

I will never buy from EA again. Not that I can remember the last time I did...

Here’s hoping Larian steps up again with their next creation.

But Mass effect has guns. It was basically a Shooter

Guns and football are fine, and everything else is under the microscope

So business as usual?

It sucks to lose all these companies, but it's kind of been coming for a long time, the whole gaming industry is basically resetting. Going back to millions of small companies instead of thousands or hundreds of big companies. The companies got too big and too slow. Things changed, and they couldn't keep up. Not to mention so much money wasted, or worse handed directly to CEOs or other upper management.

Despite all the big companies dying, gaming as a whole is still great. Besides having to filter out games that put AI in charge, the rest of the games nowadays are actually doing awesome innovative stuff instead of "game we liked +1". As much as I like when both exist, it's predicated on not wasting money, and ideally at least some new ideas in the sequel.

EA has methodically destroyed pieces of my childhood.

Did their writing improve with BG3? I played both DOS games and while I really enjoyed the gameplay, the story was just awful.

EA hasn't been worth a shit since NHL '95 for Sega Genesis.

Even the "game we liked +1" stuff is pretty good these days, since there are indie studios making spiritual successors to games with niche appeal that traditional publishers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Stuff like Lunacid, Gloomwood, and the entire boomer shooter genre are basically just "what if X was made without the technology limitations of the time" and it's great.

The writing improved massively.

This is the opportunity for 2K to revive their hockey franchise and do something amazing with it. The market (and the ea hate) is ripe for it.

2K isn't a spectacular company either (hello microtransactions). But I'm just saying this is their opportunity if they were smart enough to take it.

I don't really game much anymore bc of life and sadness but I just launched SWKOTOR for the first time since 2012 and forgot it was a BioWare game. Its so good.

It was just "bioware" in name only anyways.

Stories might have themes, and those themes might hurt a potential customer's feelings. Much easier (and safer for the stock price) to just not have stories and ideas anymore.

As a Canadian, I'd love to see that. NHL is basically our Madden or FIFA, and while I don't even like sports games all that much, I'd like to see some competition in that market.

What corporate business does best.

Stories and themes might induce thinking by the consumer which is bad

It's almost hilarious to see the steam next gongshow, juxtaposed with all these studio closures.

Someone made a comment recently in another thread about the prevalence of shitty bootleg/noname games all over the place back in the 80s, and how nintendo started putting a gold seal of authenticity on their games as a kind of quality assurance for gamers. That's what game studios are now, to some extent, for me, with the new flood of AI garbage. Killing off studios known for making quality products is a terrible strategy.

I've heard stories from people that work on Microsoft games, about how they have whole departments/teams that do things like equity and representation reviews to try and ensure that products are not pushing any potentially offensive stereotype.

It's a ton of added overhead for anything with a narrative, if your company is big enough to get sued by special interest groups.

One reason smaller companies can put out interesting indie games, is because they can focus on the gameplay instead of big social/political issues.

Bioware hasn't made a quality product since Mass Effect 1 or Dragon Age: Origins - whichever came last.

Not where I thought that was going. I would think, based on the rest of your comment, that the reason indie games can be more interesting is that they can worry less about potentially being offensive and therefore focus more on social/political issues.

Yeah, so bear sex and any combo of boobs and dicks for characters is a go, and Larian gets awards, and suddenly the indie studio gets huge. I can't imagine bear sex getting the green light in something like a microsoft game. It'd almost definitely get removed by the review, out of concern of getting sued for all kinds of reasons. Larian could take that gamble, and even after winning awards, it isn't such a well known company as to draw the interests of people like predatory lawyers seeking class action settlements for turning kids on to furry futa sex. Even with their win fall, it's not the sort of honeypot for lawsuits as a big corp like MS or EA.

Hehe yeah, Bioware just hits closer to home for me, as I know a few employees, and was very close to being one myself at one point. Some part of me is glad I didn't ride that rollercoaster. But it still probably would have been overall better than not riding it was.

Well, sure, it went to shit once they got gobbled by EA -- both ME and DAO were released so close to the acquisition by EA, that they were clearly made primarily under the old, more indie, setup. But it's still a studio that I remember fondly, generally, and would still check their new releases when they came out (even if I didn't play them).

To me they're in the same general boat as a studio like Relic. I played the early Dawn of War games quite a bit. After they got gobbled by... Sega? I think? I sorta lost touch with their games in terms of buying them/playing them, because they just didn't seem to hit the same. I think they got sold off to a venture capital group now, but it's still a company that I at least look at their games when they announce stuff. I'd put others like ID software, or even some publishers like Paradox, in this group too.

Canadians need to fight for these studios getting the support our oil or car companies get. We punch way above our weight in this industry. After ripping bioware away from ea of course.

I hate EA as much (or more) as the next guy, but let's not pretend here: guns and football sell.

EA is not a company of gamers. They're a company of corpos. They follow the money.

Similar things have been happening in the movie industry. Why is every studio pumping out predictable rehashed trash? Because it sells.

Everyone on this largely esoteric forum is probably already voting with their wallets. We aren't the ones buying these vaccuous games, but the market is clearly there. It's much harder to fix that issue.

It's not just that they sell, it's that their audiences aren't as discerning. The guns and football guys will always buy the next guns and football games even if it sucks, even if it's full of ads, even if it's made by child slavery. They just want to shovel shit to the shit-eaters and get paid.

"Space guns are unAmarican!"

It's not about quality, it is about what makes most money. See their sports titles, they suck, but are making lots of money.

I disagree. Under EA's banner, we got Burnout, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Titanfall, Apex Legends, Star Wars: Fallen Order and even a decent remaster of Command & Conquer series. Also what about Star Wars: Squadrons, a very unlikely game to happen, but here we are. So it's not like only shit came out of EA. At least for me. Now if you talk about sports games specifically, I can't talk about that. Never liked EA sports games anyway.

I mean I thought Doom 2016 and Eternal were great, but I can't disagree with anything else you've said.

I haven't bought an EA title in years. Good luck, you have a few good IPs, but there's a lot of other competition out there, and even small studios put you to shame these days. Gamers want to be entertained, not roll into a casino.

It sells because there’s not any other alternatives. If I go to the movies and the only things are available or some shitty rehashes what’s my alternative?

And then they wonder why not as many people are going to see movies.

I bought The Sims 3 a few years ago on Steam.

Had to get a pirated version because the official one didn't run in Linux whilst the pirate version runs just fine.

That's the full extent of my EA purchases since about 2006 - I've pretty much been boycotting them since they released a Battlefield DLC way back that gave more powerful weapons in multiplayer to anybody with the DLC than the base game had even in base game maps (thus forcing people to buy the DLC to be competitive in Multiplayer).

In fact EA was pretty much the first games publisher in my shit list since they started enshittifying even before the rest of the AAA part of the industry.

As long as the most money comes from idiots that buy FIFA every year, and from idiots that buy microtransactions, this is what we will get.

BioWare destroyed themselves.

Really? In surprised. Streams usually good about that. I don't even use windows at all.

In any event, I get it. I almost pirated resident evil requiem when I couldn't pau it on vacation because a fully offline game required an internet connection to launch 🙃

because there are good original films? horror's been especially good for it this year, at least in the sense that the original films are making money.

Movies example was just an analogy.

If everyone is drooling over GTA 6 as if it was the coming of the messiah, then why blame corporations for axing games that don't make money.

The majority of people are after what newest shiniest thing everyone else are talking about. And most Indy games don't make a profit or can barely recoup the expanses and pay the bills. Support the indies or stop pearl clutching

I feel like horror is helped by a large and dedicated fan base that still likes going out to theaters and enjoys original stories. I can't really say the same about action movie fans.

That's my general experience too since I moved my gaming PC to Linux about 2 years ago, both with Steam games and GoG games - very few games have problems and even fewer have unsolvable problems.

I bet the fault is in EA's DRM for that game, which was pretty bad when it came out, since Steam doesn't at all force them publishers to remove their DRM so there's going to be all kinds of evil shit in there especially in AAA games from a certain era.

I'm almost certain a GoG version of that game (if there ever was one) would work flawlessly in Linux with Wine, same as the pirated version.

Fuck EA

Guns and football sells, so does Stardew Valley and Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Lots of stuff sells if you don't undermine and condescend it at every step of the way.

hurt a potential customer’s feelings

You meant to say they might hurt the upper management's feelings because of their shitty rightwing politics they carry around like a fragile vase ready to smash and start screaming at someone for forcing them to break it.

This is the best case scenario for corporate businesses, a slow gradual extraction of resources that successfully removes everything of value over a long enough time period not to have overwhelming blowback.

So do lightsabers, Respawn has been kept alive

Mass Effect and DA also sold, until they finished Mass Effect and created a crappy spinoff. Anthem only generated hate for them since they stopped updating it real soon and now have closed the servers altogether. BioWare went from almost a game a year of pure gold to eh maybe you'll get one every 4-5 and you'll be lucky if it's any good.