Mass Effect Franchise Put on Ice, BioWare New IP Delayed, Montreal Studio Downsized

[kensu]

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for the first time, I can't believe they're Bioware games because they're actually good.

I pretty much gave up on them with Jade Empire, when they decided to strip it of most of its RPG elements (like, you know, an inventory system) to appeal to people who hated RPGs. I turned it off after I was told I was about to take part in a battle, and it switched to a Galaga-like minigame.

Selling out to EA was really the last straw; I have never played any of the ME or DA games, and nothing I've ever seen about them has made me reconsider that decision.

[Yonjuro]

Maybe this is obvious and I'm just not getting it, but why would EA buy/acquire existing developers only to then put them out of business?  If said developer is talented and worth purchasing in the first place, wouldn't it make more sense to keep them afloat?  And if they're not talented, why buy them in the first place?

 

I get that EA's done it in the past, so I'm not disputing it.  I'm more curious *why* they do it.

 

 It isn't obvious, but here is the rough idea:

 

If you are running a large company and a small competitor is making similar stuff better than you are, you have four choices. 

 

1. Buy them and sell their stuff instead of yours. (e.g. Google buying YouTube and shutting down Google Video)

 

2. Buy them and let their stuff rot, just to get rid of the competition. (e.g., (not exactly an acquisition, but) Microsoft hired the senior developers of the Mach micro kernel, stuck them in the playpen known as Microsoft Research and did nothing with Mach)

 

3. Lose in the marketplace. (e.g Yahoo vs. Google).

 

4. Make better stuff and out compete them (eg. .... hmm drawing a blank here, I'm sure this must happen sometimes)

4a. Use an effective monopoly position to kill them in spite of their stuff being better (e.g. The U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust court case)

 

Whether a company chooses option 1 or 2 probably depends partly on the attitudes of the decision makers (are they trying to get paid to make the best stuff or are they trying to make money) and partly on how entrenched the products are vs. how much the acquisition costs. That is, if a small company is cheap to buy and shutting down a project and  marketing a different product is very expensive, it is rational for the larger company to kill the smaller one (even though it hurts consumers of the products).

 

Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can. 

 

 The issue is that what is best for a single company isn't what's best for everybody. This why there are antitrust laws in many countries. and why it might be better if there were stronger ones (but carefully, because it is difficult to get things exactly right and not overdo it). 

 

 Finally, note that there are a lot of other reasons for acquisitions and there are a lot of reasons why a company might complete an acquisition and shutter the acquired company later.  The above is just to give you the gist of one situation.

 

Edited May 15, 2017 by Yonjuro

[Zoraptor]

 

..They tend to get a pass because their core games have a high fanboy density- not undeservedly, their internally developed games have nearly all been quality, albeit sometimes delayed quality- ..

 

well you forgetting CK and CK2, Stellaris, Europa Universalis...

 

per quote I certainly didn't forget them. All bar one of those above are core Paradox games though, published and deved by the Paradox mothership. CK1 is the part exception, since it was a 'rescue' project from a different dev and was not meant to be developed by Paradox themselves- and it still has the severe zero morale on reload bug. Though I suspect you may have meant Hearts of Iron (IV) anyway, since CK1 is over a decade old.

 

The discussion was specifically about publisher quality though, and there while they have had some successful published games there are not actually that many, and especially not that many when compared to the number of turkeys. Apart from Magicka all their published successes are recent as well. Fact is that Paradox has done pretty much all the standard publisher guff from excess trivial dlc to releasing crapware to shutting down servers; and there's a whole lot more as well I couldn't be bothered mentioning but can if you want.

[FlintlockJazz]

 

Maybe this is obvious and I'm just not getting it, but why would EA buy/acquire existing developers only to then put them out of business?  If said developer is talented and worth purchasing in the first place, wouldn't it make more sense to keep them afloat?  And if they're not talented, why buy them in the first place?

 

I get that EA's done it in the past, so I'm not disputing it.  I'm more curious *why* they do it.

 

 It isn't obvious, but here is the rough idea:

 

If you are running a large company and a small competitor is making similar stuff better than you are, you have four choices. 

 

1. Buy them and sell their stuff instead of yours. (e.g. Google buying YouTube and shutting down Google Video)

 

2. Buy them and let their stuff rot, just to get rid of the competition. (e.g., (not exactly an acquisition, but) Microsoft hired the senior developers of the Mach micro kernel, stuck them in the playpen known as Microsoft Research and did nothing with Mach)

 

3. Lose in the marketplace. (e.g Yahoo vs. Google).

 

4. Make better stuff and out compete them (eg. .... hmm drawing a blank here, I'm sure this must happen sometimes)

4a. Use an effective monopoly position to kill them in spite of their stuff being better (e.g. The U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust court case)

 

Whether a company chooses option 1 or 2 probably depends partly on the attitudes of the decision makers (are they trying to get paid to make the best stuff or are they trying to make money) and partly on how entrenched the products are vs. how much the acquisition costs. That is, if a small company is cheap to buy and shutting down a project and  marketing a different product is very expensive, it is rational for the larger company to kill the smaller one (even though it hurts consumers of the products).

 

Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can. 

 

 The issue is that what is best for a single company isn't what's best for everybody. This why there are antitrust laws in many countries. and why it might be better if there were stronger ones (but carefully, because it is difficult to get things exactly right and not overdo it). 

 

 Finally, note that there are a lot of other reasons for acquisitions and there are a lot of reasons why a company might complete an acquisition and shutter the acquired company later.  The above is just to give you the gist of one situation.

 

In addition to what Yonjuro has said, remember that their customers will only spend so much per month on games, they only have so much time to commit to each game etc, and so are only likely to buy a certain number of games at a time.  If all those games are yours, great, but quite often they'll buy one of your games and not the other, and while you get the money for the first game the second game ends up wasting you money, and your products end up competing with themselves which is not good for you. 

 

With the costs of triple-A gaming they want to maximise profits and so sell it to as many people as possible, and another product is a rival to that even if it is your own product.  That's yet another reason why a game will never get greenlit by a company even if it would do really well, because it may impact on another of their product (add to this, if you are the head of X game development cycle and you hear that a colleague in your company is proposing Y game that could threaten yours, what would you do?). 

[Oerwinde]

 

Maybe this is obvious and I'm just not getting it, but why would EA buy/acquire existing developers only to then put them out of business?  If said developer is talented and worth purchasing in the first place, wouldn't it make more sense to keep them afloat?  And if they're not talented, why buy them in the first place?

 

I get that EA's done it in the past, so I'm not disputing it.  I'm more curious *why* they do it.

 

 It isn't obvious, but here is the rough idea:

 

If you are running a large company and a small competitor is making similar stuff better than you are, you have four choices. 

 

1. Buy them and sell their stuff instead of yours. (e.g. Google buying YouTube and shutting down Google Video)

 

2. Buy them and let their stuff rot, just to get rid of the competition. (e.g., (not exactly an acquisition, but) Microsoft hired the senior developers of the Mach micro kernel, stuck them in the playpen known as Microsoft Research and did nothing with Mach)

 

3. Lose in the marketplace. (e.g Yahoo vs. Google).

 

4. Make better stuff and out compete them (eg. .... hmm drawing a blank here, I'm sure this must happen sometimes)

4a. Use an effective monopoly position to kill them in spite of their stuff being better (e.g. The U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust court case)

 

Whether a company chooses option 1 or 2 probably depends partly on the attitudes of the decision makers (are they trying to get paid to make the best stuff or are they trying to make money) and partly on how entrenched the products are vs. how much the acquisition costs. That is, if a small company is cheap to buy and shutting down a project and  marketing a different product is very expensive, it is rational for the larger company to kill the smaller one (even though it hurts consumers of the products).

 

Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can. 

 

 The issue is that what is best for a single company isn't what's best for everybody. This why there are antitrust laws in many countries. and why it might be better if there were stronger ones (but carefully, because it is difficult to get things exactly right and not overdo it). 

 

 Finally, note that there are a lot of other reasons for acquisitions and there are a lot of reasons why a company might complete an acquisition and shutter the acquired company later.  The above is just to give you the gist of one situation.

 

 

I feel like they have their business model, and they see indy developers doing really well with a decent fan base and they say "We want that" then they try to incorporate them into their business model, and it ends up destroying what made that indy dev successful in the first place(IE forcing Bioware to jam multiplayer into every game despite being known for their single player experiences.)

 

We are experiencing something similar where I work. We were the most successful branch of our company in terms of sales and efficiency, company got sold, new parent company decides to implement a bunch of stuff to unify us with the parent, that changed the way we do things/destroyed the culture of the branch, we are now struggling to make numbers, we have lost like 1/3rd of our customers, and everyone hates working there now.

[SonicMage117]

Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can.

THIS. That is correct..

 

There is no such thing as an "evil" company in the gaming industry. That's just a paranoid mindset that the community has made up because people are angry when things do not go their way. I have seen the term "Evil corporation" often on Steam forums.

 

I know people can and have given me many reasons why they "think" evil companies exist within the gaming industry but none of them have been really valid outside of bias, personal feelings or grudges getting involved. On the outside of that it's business, whether it's ridiculous dlc or whatever, it's as is, a choice for people to make. Vote with thy wallet and stuff.

[kirottu]

I agree. Buying game developers and turning them into **** before killing them isn't evil. It's double plus ungood.

[SonicMage117]

I don't take anyone's "personal" opinion as fact. You can say that a game is bad, someone else out there in the world will love that game. In fact, (and it is a fact) we've all played and loved at least one game in our lives, that most of the gaming community has perceived as bad. A company putting out bad games or "ruining" franchises doesn't make the company bad or evil, it means the company did something wrong, made wrong decisions and needs to learn and grow from that. Unfortunately, sometimes that doesn't happen and conpanies still keep making the same mistakes, that still doesn't make them bad/evil or even stupid by any means. They are smart people who are human and are not perfect.

 

Somehow this generation has gotten too confused along the way to know the difference, especially if people think that a company will maliciously release bad products to hurt or kill off a fan-base, then I'm not too sure what to think about this generations ethics on business...

[213374U]

I feel like they have their business model, and they see indy developers doing really well with a decent fan base and they say "We want that" then they try to incorporate them into their business model, and it ends up destroying what made that indy dev successful in the first place(IE forcing Bioware to jam multiplayer into every game despite being known for their single player experiences.)

I don't know in general, but that's certainly not what happened with Bioware. The obligatory MP mode started with ME3, and the multiplayer component in that game was handled by a completely different studio (Montreal, while the main game was developed in Edmonton), and it was a stripped down version of what seems to have been initially prototyped as a standalone Battlefield-esque FPS. It was also such an unexpected success that its monetization model was copied and has more or less become standard. Their focus on multiplayer can be said to have begun with the choice to make SWTOR an MMO instead of another single player installment in the franchise, and whose development begun before the company was acquired by EA.

 

Whatever the reason, "big names" have been slowly but steadily quitting the company, and that, coupled with EA's culture of style over substance, dismal QA and especially microtransactions bull**** is, in my mind, what has done the most damage to Bioware in the last few years.

 

As for EA "learning the lesson": lol. Companies the size of EA are literally impervious to criticism, and weak sales simply result in canned product lines. Enjoy the memories and move on.

[Leferd]

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for the first time, I can't believe they're Bioware games because they're actually good.

I pretty much gave up on them with Jade Empire, when they decided to strip it of most of its RPG elements (like, you know, an inventory system) to appeal to people who hated RPGs. I turned it off after I was told I was about to take part in a battle, and it switched to a Galaga-like minigame.

Selling out to EA was really the last straw; I have never played any of the ME or DA games, and nothing I've ever seen about them has made me reconsider that decision.

 

I liked Jade Empire. The system was conducive to the martial arts setting. 

[marelooke]

 

I feel like they have their business model, and they see indy developers doing really well with a decent fan base and they say "We want that" then they try to incorporate them into their business model, and it ends up destroying what made that indy dev successful in the first place(IE forcing Bioware to jam multiplayer into every game despite being known for their single player experiences.)

I don't know in general, but that's certainly not what happened with Bioware. The obligatory MP mode started with ME3, and the multiplayer component in that game was handled by a completely different studio (Montreal, while the main game was developed in Edmonton), and it was a stripped down version of what seems to have been initially prototyped as a standalone Battlefield-esque FPS. It was also such an unexpected success that its monetization model was copied and has more or less become standard. Their focus on multiplayer can be said to have begun with the choice to make SWTOR an MMO instead of another single player installment in the franchise, and whose development begun before the company was acquired by EA.

 

 

You touch on another point though. These types of enterprises see games as products to be made and assembled, hence why they attempt to have parts developed in low wage countries(1). This is challenging in the best of cases (I get to deal with this kind of stuff daily) but for something that's at least in part an artistic endeavour I don't see how this can work out in an environment where most employees lack passion for what they're doing. And how can you expect people that have passion when they have no input in what they're doing?

 

Then of course there's the typical shoehorning of things into products because some manager's read some article somewhere or has been to some congress where they told him something's the next big thing... (I still remember one of ours coming into the office proclaiming we needed to "do something with big data", me and my colleague nearly got our eyes stuck staring at our brain...)

 

Occasionally you'll find someone (or some holdover) of passionate people that get something decent done despite the environment they're in, but that's an exception and it usually takes so much energy out of them fighting the "establishment" that they'll either burn out and stop caring or quit eventually anyway. (or both)

 

Whatever the reason, "big names" have been slowly but steadily quitting the company, and that, coupled with EA's culture of style over substance, dismal QA and especially microtransactions bull**** is, in my mind, what has done the most damage to Bioware in the last few years.

 

As for EA "learning the lesson": lol. Companies the size of EA are literally impervious to criticism, and weak sales simply result in canned product lines. Enjoy the memories and move on.

 

EA basically appears to be a cliché American "enterprise" with everything that entails (I expect to walk straight into a Dilbert cartoon should I go to work there). So yeah, the company culture is likely a big part of the reason why big names have been quitting (if not for what I wroter earlier). Those that stay either do so out of convenience or because they can't afford to leave for some reason.

 

(1) the problem here being the "low wage" part, not the "country" part, as my girlfriend always says: "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys".

Edited May 16, 2017 by marelooke

[Darkpriest]

The BIG reason why EA has this policy, is because they have no idea how to make good games and create new Franchise... It is easier and cheaper to buy someone with established IPs and milk them than to try and error on your own new IPs.

 

EA does sports games well, and that's it. they try to squeeze all their products into same production cycles or revenue per annum.

 

Look at all the acquired IPs... deteriorating fast after being bought, but production cycle are shorter and you get more sales on the established IP.

 

There are companies like this in other lines of business. It is easier to grow and acquire market via acquisition than greenfielding in new locations. The thing is that in electronic entertainment, you do not need to keep the product standards of the acquired company, because his market is way more volitile due to tech changes surrounding it than other markets. The other difference is that you acquire the products which are already for a global market, however a different consumer focus. Company will naturally gravitate towards expanding th consumer base, thus sacrificing the uniqueness, which created a given IP.

[Darkpriest]

 

 

I feel like they have their business model, and they see indy developers doing really well with a decent fan base and they say "We want that" then they try to incorporate them into their business model, and it ends up destroying what made that indy dev successful in the first place(IE forcing Bioware to jam multiplayer into every game despite being known for their single player experiences.)

I don't know in general, but that's certainly not what happened with Bioware. The obligatory MP mode started with ME3, and the multiplayer component in that game was handled by a completely different studio (Montreal, while the main game was developed in Edmonton), and it was a stripped down version of what seems to have been initially prototyped as a standalone Battlefield-esque FPS. It was also such an unexpected success that its monetization model was copied and has more or less become standard. Their focus on multiplayer can be said to have begun with the choice to make SWTOR an MMO instead of another single player installment in the franchise, and whose development begun before the company was acquired by EA.

 

 

EA basically appears to be a cliché American "enterprise" with everything that entails (I expect to walk straight into a Dilbert cartoon should I go to work there). So yeah, the company culture is likely a big part of the reason why big names have been quitting (if not for what I wroter earlier). Those that stay either do so out of convenience or because they can't afford to leave for some reason.

 

(1) the problem here being the "low wage" part, not the "country" part, as my girlfriend always says: "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys".

 

 

I would disagree here. It's not a matter of pure cost cutting, it's a matter of a corporate culture at your destination.

 

For example in Poland you'd often get as good programmers on average if not better than your average in high cost locations. Just look at various global contests in this field and what these guys can do on technical universities with funding of 0.01% of what US top schools get (might exaggerate the cost part a bit, but the disparity is huge)

 

Then look also at the studios, which bring on average similar quality products to the high cost locations in terms of games and sometimes they can produce a real gem (see the Witcher franchise for example)

 

Same goes to other technically low cost countries. if these countries have good education, they can easily compete with their work force. however the problem often lies with mentality and corporate culture.

 

For example, if in India employees get financially punished even for minor errors and are thought to adhere the procedure to the letter, then do not be surprised that your email with a problem will bounce 20 times, including three times telling that you should raise an error ticket.

 

If the culture pushes for cheap drones, then you will get those. If the culture pushes for problem solvers, you will get those as well, as long as you pay competitively in relation to the local market and purchase power of a dollar. That way you can still save 60% and get similar if not better quality.

[Yonjuro]

 

.... 

 

With the costs of triple-A gaming they want to maximise profits and so sell it to as many people as possible, and another product is a rival to that even if it is your own product.  That's yet another reason why a game will never get greenlit by a company even if it would do really well, because it may impact on another of their product (add to this, if you are the head of X game development cycle and you hear that a colleague in your company is proposing Y game that could threaten yours, what would you do?). 

 

 

 That's a good point and it's especially true when an acquired company is run as a separate division. The other divisions still view them as competition. On the other hand, if the acquired company is better integrated into the company that purchased them, this happens:

 

.....

We are experiencing something similar where I work. We were the most successful branch of our company in terms of sales and efficiency, company got sold, new parent company decides to implement a bunch of stuff to unify us with the parent, that changed the way we do things/destroyed the culture of the branch, we are now struggling to make numbers, we have lost like 1/3rd of our customers, and everyone hates working there now.

 

 

 Doing a successful acquisition is like sewing together an elephant and a giraffe to get a tall animal that can pick things up with its nose. Even if you really want it to work, it probably won't go well (unless you have a really good surgeon on staff).

[Yonjuro]

 

Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can.

THIS. That is correct..

 

There is no such thing as an "evil" company in the gaming industry. That's just a paranoid mindset that the community has made up because people are angry when things do not go their way. I have seen the term "Evil corporation" often on Steam forums.

 

I know people can and have given me many reasons why they "think" evil companies exist within the gaming industry but none of them have been really valid outside of bias, personal feelings or grudges getting involved. On the outside of that it's business, whether it's ridiculous dlc or whatever, it's as is, a choice for people to make. Vote with thy wallet and stuff.

 

 

 Yes. They don't have meetings at EA where they try to figure out new ways to ruin everything for everybody.

 

 On the other hand, what's best for EA has turned out to not be the best for customers of the now rotting corpse of Bioware. 

 

 So, yes, vote with your wallet. Don't buy the latest AAA shiny crap unless you want more shiny crap. 

[marelooke]

 

 

 

I feel like they have their business model, and they see indy developers doing really well with a decent fan base and they say "We want that" then they try to incorporate them into their business model, and it ends up destroying what made that indy dev successful in the first place(IE forcing Bioware to jam multiplayer into every game despite being known for their single player experiences.)

I don't know in general, but that's certainly not what happened with Bioware. The obligatory MP mode started with ME3, and the multiplayer component in that game was handled by a completely different studio (Montreal, while the main game was developed in Edmonton), and it was a stripped down version of what seems to have been initially prototyped as a standalone Battlefield-esque FPS. It was also such an unexpected success that its monetization model was copied and has more or less become standard. Their focus on multiplayer can be said to have begun with the choice to make SWTOR an MMO instead of another single player installment in the franchise, and whose development begun before the company was acquired by EA.

 

 

 

EA basically appears to be a cliché American "enterprise" with everything that entails (I expect to walk straight into a Dilbert cartoon should I go to work there). So yeah, the company culture is likely a big part of the reason why big names have been quitting (if not for what I wroter earlier). Those that stay either do so out of convenience or because they can't afford to leave for some reason.

 

(1) the problem here being the "low wage" part, not the "country" part, as my girlfriend always says: "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys".

 

 

I would disagree here. It's not a matter of pure cost cutting, it's a matter of a corporate culture at your destination.

 

For example in Poland you'd often get as good programmers on average if not better than your average in high cost locations. Just look at various global contests in this field and what these guys can do on technical universities with funding of 0.01% of what US top schools get (might exaggerate the cost part a bit, but the disparity is huge)

 

Then look also at the studios, which bring on average similar quality products to the high cost locations in terms of games and sometimes they can produce a real gem (see the Witcher franchise for example)

 

Same goes to other technically low cost countries. if these countries have good education, they can easily compete with their work force. however the problem often lies with mentality and corporate culture.

 

For example, if in India employees get financially punished even for minor errors and are thought to adhere the procedure to the letter, then do not be surprised that your email with a problem will bounce 20 times, including three times telling that you should raise an error ticket.

 

If the culture pushes for cheap drones, then you will get those. If the culture pushes for problem solvers, you will get those as well, as long as you pay competitively in relation to the local market and purchase power of a dollar. That way you can still save 60% and get similar if not better quality.

 

 

I don't think we disagree, I think I just wasn't clear enough, so let me try to clarify and hopefully not make the misunderstanding worse...

 

Since you were talking about Poland (not the country that comes to my mind first when talking about low cost countries, but hey )

 

The reason why they outsource is *cost*, *what* they outsource is generally "the boring stuff". That Polish employees are relatively cheaper than, say US employees (and I don't think the difference is quite as big as you'd think at first if you factor in social security, retirement funds and all that). Generally these companies pay decent wages by local standards (not high, possibly slightly above average) but the work they have is usually, well, boring. So they get an influx of average, at best, programmers. The good ones can simply get better jobs elsewhere (better, or at least equally well paid; more intellectually stimulating,...)

 

Simply put: you get paid the same to go work on The Witcher, where you likely have some creative freedom or at least input in the process. Or you can type out code to exact specifications for, say, EA for the same wage. Where are the good programmers going do you think? (and in practice I think that the first job would actually pay better too since they actually *want* you to think, the second just requires drones). That's not to mention that I somehow suspect the atmosphere at CDPR is, errr, different from the one at EA companies.

 

Now if EA was willing to pay top money (again, by local standards) they might be able to snatch some real talent and they'd still get it cheaper than having to find an equally skilled programmer (or artist, or w/e) in the US. But that's not what they want and it's not what they do... (however, that is very much what Google, for one, does)

 

And this is assuming it's the company (eg. EA) itself that does the outsourcing, if they are using a dedicated "outsourcing" firm then you usually get the bottom of the barrel (they get programmers as cheap as possible as long as they are still competent enough to get the job done somewhat satisfactorily so as to not lose a customer), regardless of the country you're dealing with (though I guess one could argue that some barrels might be deeper than others...). Not sure if there are of those firms for Poland tbh, I think that the wages in Poland just aren't low enough for two companies to profit off of it (the outsourcing firm + the firm hiring the "resource"(1))

 

Of course there are companies that open entire branches somewhere to get entire projects done at location, that's an entirely different discussion though (we have an office in Eastern Europe and those guys are great, but they're not *so* much cheaper that I need to fear for my job or maybe I'm just underpaid by my country's standards )

 

(1) ugh, how I hate that term, I think I need to vomit now

[Zoraptor]

EA does sports games well, and that's it.

 

The Sims is an entire division at EA, equivalent to all their sports games put together. It's successful. The Battlefield franchise is certainly also successful. Whether you like them as games is subjective, but then whether you like their sports games is also subjective.

[Nonek]

 

Is anyone else here old enough to remember Origin Systems?  Origin made Ultima and Wing Commander. It was the "crowning jewel" of EA in the 1990s.  This is very reminiscence of what happened to Origin after Ultima IX.  Soon afterward, projects got delayed... and then quietly cancelled a few months later.  Then, over the next couple years, EA shut down Origin, part by part. 

 

I recognize the pattern here.  It seems that another EA-acquired studio is gonna bite the dust soon.

 

Well, good riddance.

 

The comparison isn't quite fair in my opinion, Origin were at the top of their game (and the market) when Elizabeth and Abraham acquired them: Underworld was the top dog in almost every aspect. The Black Gate, Serpent Isle and their expansions had refined the Ultima series into something legendary that a quarter century later is still waiting to be matched. Ultima Online was redefining and pioneering the multiplayer model etcetera.

 

Bioware had already begun a steady decline, and the settling into well worn grooves that it still treads to this day: Lifeless cities and hubs with almost no organic interaction or sense of place, such as is seen in Jade Empire and NWNs hubs. A reliance on iterations of the same character archetypes. The one note cheesy, squeeing humour that they still think is amusing. A protagonist who always ends up being a blatant power fantasy, while at the same time not showing anything but a capacity to collect trash and grind mobs. Static, poorly executed cinematics. Narratives that are disjointed and more holy than the Popes socks. Very poor to non existent attempts at thematic relevance and entanglement.

 

In short i'd argue that Origins loss and mismanagement by EA was a tragedy for the industry, whereas Bioware are not and have not been relevant since parts of KotOR and Dragon Age 1, they're no real loss to the genre or industry.

[Yonjuro]

"more holy than the Popes socks. "

 

 Up voted for "more holy than the Popes socks. "

[the_dog_days]

The one note cheesy, squeeing humour that they still think is amusing.

And all this time I thought I was the only one annoyed by that.

[kensu]

I'm not so sure I would blame EA for what happened to Origin. Richard Garriot and Chris Roberts have both gone on to have spectacular failures ever since. Also some of those canceled projects were pretty insane. BioForge 2 was supposed to cost several hundred dollars and ship with VR equipment; and this was in the days before USB, so you probably would've had to plug something into your motherboard to get it to work.

[Darkpriest]

@marelooke

 

Poland and eastern block countries are low cost. The average pay is low depending on what you use. if straight average, then it's around 900 EUR a month, if using median, it is around 750 EUR a month. You can get high quality specialist in the range of 2,500 - 3,000. At the range of 3,000 you usually have wages of upper management in most larger companies. wages at 5,000k plus are very rare and only in the largest and richest companies, but in that range you also get people who earn 100k a month, so disparities get huge, depending on the owner's capital.

 

now for comparison - in US in the west coast area i read some articles recently that IT engineers earning in 80k USD a year are on the very poor side of this career. So this is something like 6k EUR a month?

 

for comparison, the minimum wage in high cost locations - two weeks on minumum wage is more than a whole month for 50% of working people on various jobs, including accounting, basic IT etc.

 

Yeah, Poland is by comparison a low cost country.

 

***All amounts are in Employees Gross wage/salary

 

@Zoraptor

 

yeah forgot about SIMS - i treat that as a child of Maxis studio, although it is getting worse with each next installment and riddled with more DLCs on each installment. I recall there was a big negative noise at the launch of Sims 4...

 

Shame they killed simcity series.

 

Battlefield - not my cup of tea, but this is something that was for a long time with DICE, not EA per se. It also seen rushed installments suffering later with lower financial results. I feel like the Battlefield 1 was make or break the franchise after some previous fiaskos.

Edited May 17, 2017 by Darkpriest

[Zoraptor]

The spin off Battlefields have not gone well for the most part and recently, but the main franchise ones have all done well. They're not universally loved of course, but then nothing is. I still reckon they'll try a 'genuine' Mass Effect shooter game based on Battlefield at some point.

 

 

The one note cheesy, squeeing humour that they still think is amusing.

And all this time I thought I was the only one annoyed by that.

 

 

A lot of people dislike it- I've usually seen it described as a poor quality attempt to mimic Joss Whedon's humour. That sort of humour relies very much on having well written and well liked (in the appreciation sense, not necessarily 'nice') characters though, if you don't like the characters you tend to end up wishing they and all their 'charming' quirks would be fired into a sun.

[kensu]

The spin off Battlefields have not gone well for the most part and recently, but the main franchise ones have all done well. They're not universally loved of course, but then nothing is. I still reckon they'll try a 'genuine' Mass Effect shooter game based on Battlefield at some point.

 

 

The one note cheesy, squeeing humour that they still think is amusing.

And all this time I thought I was the only one annoyed by that.

 

 

A lot of people dislike it- I've usually seen it described as a poor quality attempt to mimic Joss Whedon's humour. That sort of humour relies very much on having well written and well liked (in the appreciation sense, not necessarily 'nice') characters though, if you don't like the characters you tend to end up wishing they and all their 'charming' quirks would be fired into a sun.

 

Or use the Force to make their wookie friend kill them. >

[Zoraptor]

That is actually one of the few Bioware set pieces that I'd (almost) unequivocally praise. Credit where due, for once they didn't pull their punches on dark side/ evil options.

 

I'd have to admit to liking Mission though. If only you could have got big Z to throttle Carth instead, but no, he's got less courage than a 14 year old girl and just runs off.