Shit news. Seems clear to me that BioWare shutting down is the result of about 15 years of problems piling upp - Lost sight of what made their games special in the first place, while chasing industry trends. - Years of development wastedd on projects that kept changing direction, with entire systems being scrapped. - Lost a ton of veteran developers and creative leads, taking decades of experience and knowledge with them. - Games became increasingly expensive to make, with development cycles stretching to 5–10 years. - Constant changes in leadership, creative direction, and priorities. - Three consecutive disappointments with Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilguard. That's a LOT of money spent without the returns EA wanted. - Meanwhile, Baldur's Gate 3 showed there's still a massive audience for the kind of RPGs BioWare used to make. - And now EA has even more pressure to cut costs and focus on franchises that reliably make money. I think the biggest issue is that BioWare simply couldn't afford to keep making these mistakes. When your games take 5–10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you don't get many chances to get it wrong. And after three consecutive disappointments, EA probably looked at the cost of rebuilding the studio, the years before another Mass Effect would release, and decided the numbers just didn't make any fucking sense anymore. Really sad outcome for a studio that helped define an entire genre.

The first game a game studio makes is usually the most time-consuming, and game a studio ever makes. But it could also be the investment that makes the next 3 games possible at a fraction of the development effort. That shit can't happen if you layoff your team after a launch.

Suddenly makes sense why lots of Epic devs have been saying they're trying to leave, recently

I'm gonna keep working on videogames ✨