BioWare is gone, and the anger around its closure is only growing. IGN’s Matt Purslow argues in a new opinion piece that EA never understood what it had in BioWare — and that the studio’s death leaves less “art” left in Electronic Arts.
The numbers tell the story of a slow dismantling. The latest round of 400 EA layoffs follows three straight years of severe cuts, including last year’s 300 staff, the cancellation of a Titanfall game, and the shuttering of Cliffhanger Games and its Black Panther project. What survives, Purslow notes, is telling: annualized sports games with huge microtransaction revenue, and live-service shooters with huge microtransaction revenue.
Mordin Solus from Mass Effect (Credits: IGN)
EA’s fall from “Can a computer make you cry?”
The piece draws a bitter line from EA’s 1983 advertisement asking “Can a computer make you cry?” — a statement of creative ambition — to today’s spreadsheet-driven publisher. In 2012 and 2013, EA was infamously named the “Worst Company in America” in Consumerist polls, for games like Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and Mass Effect 3. Purslow argues that calling the early 2010s “some of EA’s better years” sounds absurd — but the current state of the company makes it true.
Who owns EA now, and why BioWare died
Part of the answer to why BioWare died is who EA serves now: the company is owned by a group of investors including Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and the new ownership’s calculus, Purslow argues, simply has no room for a studio built on story-driven RPGs. BioWare — the studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Knights of the Old Republic — wanted to make art; its new owners, in his telling, only wanted the machine.
Also Read: ‘We Were Working on a Great Game’ — Mass Effect 5 Writers Speak Out After EA Shuts Down BioWare | Mark Darrah Says EA Might Sell Mass Effect and Dragon Age After BioWare Closure
Source: IGN — read the full story there.