God forbid they would do something with a story.
RIP BioWare, you will be missed.
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.
Stories and themes might induce thinking by the consumer which is bad
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.
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.
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.
EA has methodically destroyed pieces of my childhood.
What corporate business does best.
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.
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.
BioWare destroyed themselves.
I will never buy from EA again. Not that I can remember the last time I did…
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.
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.
It was just “bioware” in name only anyways.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙃
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.
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.
Bioware hasn’t made a quality product since Mass Effect 1 or Dragon Age: Origins - whichever came last.
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.
I mean I thought Doom 2016 and Eternal were great, but I can’t disagree with anything else you’ve said.
It’s not about quality, it is about what makes most money. See their sports titles, they suck, but are making lots of money.
Arabia-shmarabia. EA would burn and shit everything around anyway even without SA.
Fuck EA
“Saudis EAt Shit.”
I mean…idc. Let them rise and fall. I’m just not interested in this kind of stuff anymore. We’re still talking about how much this company sucks. I wish we wouldn’t. Even the constant discussions about how bad they are do them a favor. We live in a world where all publicity is good publicity. Sometimes you forget these people even exist if you set your life up the way you want to and don’t get sucked into shit.
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
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.
