If you’ve followed gaming long enough, you would be familiar with Electronic Arts long history (as far as electronic entertainment goes), of buying successful developers and shutting them down after they believe they’ve squeezed all the profit they can out of them. Some examples include Origin Systems, Pandemic Studios, Bullfrog Productions and one most felt by me: Westwood Studios. This is not an exhaustive list either. Many of these studios were also still producing quality products when they were shutdown and/or merged with another studio owned by EA. This has been something of a morbid joke amongst gamers for over twenty years.
The latest in this increasingly long list is BioWare which comes two years after the release of the widely mocked Dragon Age: The Veilguard two years ago this month. Though it generally reviewed well among “official” critics, it sold poorly and was not well-received by people who actually play games; most importantly among fans of the series (which once included me). It was also the third game in a row after Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem to perform poorly over a decade after their last big success, Dragon Age: Inquisition. While Inquisition sold over twelve million copies, sales data for these other three is hard to pin down which suggests they didn’t sell well as EA would have certainly released the figures otherwise.
While I have lamented the loss of a number of studios closed by EA, I really couldn’t care less about BioWare. It is there own fault as I will explain below.
The first thing to get out of the way is that the BioWare as it existed until this year was not the same company. The two founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk left the company after the release of Mass Effect 3 fourteen years ago in 2012. It has clearly seen further talent drain since as the only successful release since 2014’s Inquisition was a re-release of the Mass Effect trilogy titled, Mass Effect Legendary Edition though curiously this also has no official sales figures available. In any case, however well it may have done, it was not a “new” game and so the port could have been delegated to any studio that EA chose. BioWare didn’t even do it right as it is missing at least one DLC package from the original and made some unnecessary changes along with the enhancements.
In contrast, Origin Systems had made one of the earliest and most successful MMORPGs of all time back in 1997 and one that remains online almost thirty years later. Westwood Studios had a couple of lukewarm releases before being closed and merged with another studio less than a year after their final game released. Yet new titles in their Command & Conquer series continued until 2010 and BioWare was even working on a title in the series that was eventually cancelled. Bullfrog Productions was closed and merged the same year of its final release Theme Park Inc. Pandemic Studios was closed before their final game, The Saboteur released in late 2009. Yet BioWare was kept open for twelve years after their last successful game released and two after what is now their discordant swan song.
Further, unlike all the other studios, what was left of BioWare had maintained a rather adversarial relationship with a large portion of their fanbase going back to 2012 which was especially obvious in Dragon Age: The Veilguard; a game that makes the poorly received Dragon Age II look like a masterpiece. So BioWare really deserved to be closed and I agree with RazörFist, that the companies demise should even be celebrated.
To share my personal perspective, I was a BioWare fan from the original Mass Effect until the release of Mass Effect 3. At one stage, I owned the collector’s editions for all three games and had read many of the tie-in novels and comics. Of the twenty or so games they developed, I’ve played over half and most of these through to the story’s end (including Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood). I loved Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire and in the lead-up to Dragon Age: Origin‘s release, I pre-ordered the collector’s edition and read the terrible tie-in novel The Stolen Throne. I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins well-enough at the time and tried the sequel (though not for very long).
Between about 2009 and 2012, I would have told you that the Mass Effect series were among my favourite video games but now I don’t think much of them at all. I was one of the many disappointed by the poor ending to Mass Effect 3 that received such a strong backlash that BioWare released an expanded (though still ultimately underwhelming), ending as free DLC. The last new BioWare game I played after this was Mass Effect: Andromeda which I bought well-below retail around a year after it’s release. It had some interesting elements but was still mediocre at best.
Thinking back, the once great developer began to decline around the time EA bought the company but I wouldn’t say EA was the direct reason. Mass Effect was the last truly ambitious title BioWare developed and the game’s that followed both cut elements of the original that should have been expanded upon in the sequels. The crash of the Normandy and the death of Shepherd at the beginning of Mass Effect 2 can be seen metaphorically as the death of what the original game set out to achieve in favour of a more streamlined game with “mass appeal”. This proved to be the case as many more players hopped on board with the sequel and these new fans tended to prefer the character interactions to the more had sci-fi elements found in the first. The third title was a story-driven action title and no longer a genuine RPG but it was still engaging enough until right before the end.
This was also around the time I first became conscious that the industry was becoming more hostile to its own audience leading up to #GamerGate in 2014. It was especially apparent in the way many journalists dismissed player complaints about the Mass Effect 3 ending as “entitlement”. By this time, most gaming website and developers had been converged by people with little genuine interest in gaming. Once they were in, they could hire more people that shared their politics but had even less talent. This was all helped with DEI policies from above and especially in the last six years.
The difference with BioWare is that they’d already ceased to make good games over a decade before their demise and managed to coast on their previous successes much longer than any other developer.