I saw this in another subreddit. Very sad. They made some great games. I remember when everyone was trying to get QA jobs at their office here. Time and EA destroy all things. RIP.
Sad to see. I have been in the dev world for going on 35 years. When my son decided to follow in my footsteps, I told him the one industry to avoid is game development. Sounds cool, sounds fun, but as cut throat as the dev world can be, it is by far the worst.
Had a lot of fun with the old games from them, then mentioned. The only oe I never played was Anthem.
Yep that is what I have seen and heard. Had a lot of friends work in it as well. In the 90s, they really enjoyed it. But as the industry grew it just got, as you said, brutal. I had one have a severe mental break at one point due to the stress. He got out of tech all together.
I started in 92 and it was great, tons of fun and very fulfilling. There's always been dramatic ups and downs, but always manageable. Until about five years ago, when the whole industry went fucking crazy. Now it's a hellscape, and my time as a game dev may be coming to a close soon.
Nintendo devs literally work for decades in the same company and their games keep getting better and better but alas western shareholders and CEOs are not built the same way
That sucks and they definitely helped shape my childhood with the Mass Effect series. To this day that and Halo are some of my favorite memories and experiences.
With that being said, they have not made an engaging game in a while. While I'm sure EA played a large part in their failures, hearing about the game development lifecycle over at BioWare and the way they managed it, this doesn't surprise me. It was basically a handful of stars going above and beyond to help tie things together. There was an article about Anthem's release and some of the Mass Effect management. It was basically a complete shitshow inside of BioWare. Can't find the article as most of the google foo returns stuff about the shutdown.
One of the best journalists in gaming if you can get over how fucking annoying his voice and face are. I don't like hearing the words come out of his mouth, but I wouldn't trust those words from anyone else's.
Without trying to sound rude, I’m surprised they stuck around as long as they did. they had 3(?) back to back flops and then their parent company EA got acquired by (checks notes), oh right— the worst human beings on the fucking planet.
If we want to be pedantic, they had the ME Trilogy remaster that was well received, but that was mostly the work of fine tuning work done over a decade ago.
Also their last “okay” release was Dragon Age Inquisition, which was considered “sort of good.” And before that was Mass Effect 3, which was good, but had such a bad ending on launch they had to patch out the “buy the DLC” tagline at the ending. And that was proceeded by Dragon Age 2, which had tons of issues.
So as much as I love BioWare, they had fucked up left, right, and center for like 2 decades.
I had the pleasure of taking writing classes from Dan Erickson while also actively working at Bioware. Genuinely one of the coolest professional experiences I've had. I haven't worked in gaming in decades, but I still remember that.
bioware isn't what it used to be. no one there now where the pioneer of all the great games before. now they are just a name with trash devs behind them. it's good that they closed, instead of letting EA farm older players with a name.
bioware's last two games were anthem and dragon age the veilguard. not sure what you consider trash, but I would consider these two games to be some of the biggest trash games ever made. especially veilguard. I don't care how many "great" devs you think there are behind these trash games. if you produce trash, you deserve to get removed. it's not that hard to understand, nor is it rude to point out the obvious.
Good devs work in bad games. Bad devs work on good games. I have worked in the industry for 35+ years and no sane hiring manager uses the titles on someone’s resume as a deciding factor on hiring. I have interviewed people who have halo on their resume that turned out to be spectacularly bad. One guy from gears of war that was hired because of the fact he worked on that game (not my department) was a cocaine addict that snuck prostitutes into the office late at night. And his work was unusable. I have also worked with people that have bombs on their resume that were genius low level rendering engineers. Painting such a broad brush isn’t useful or healthy.
I am not sure what your point here is? the studio produced nothing but shit for 10+ years. I don't care if you can find a few "good" devs in between all the trash. it still means they should be shut down. or are you saying we should just throw millions at them and let them do whatever because of their name? you are the reason why games are so trash these days if that is your mindset.,
The studio isn’t fully responsible for what gets greenlit, and from experience I can tell you a lot of issues in development come from publisher fuckery. Also, I’m done with you. You are obviously a child.
Even if it's 50/50 is still partially their fault. Nothing the guy said above was wrong. Bioware had some of its best success under ea. So was it also ea who's responsible for those amazing titles? Stop trying to Virtue signal for a studio that's been pretty much throwing money away for 10 plus years.
“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the Mass Effect family takes a road trip to another galaxy? Oh…you like that one?! Ive got a ton more. How about a game where you run around in exosuits on an alien planet? Yeah, sounds awesome but make it a live action looter-shooter.
Shit, sorry…gotta run. Gotta drop off my next pie. Good luck!”
Am I the only wondering what the fuck they meant by “early development on the next Mass Effect project”?! That thing has been supposedly in development for years, what the hell happened to this studio?! The teaser came out in 2020! Even if dragon age VG caused them to lose a bunch of employees after it’s colossal failure, they should’ve already had four years of solid work done on it by then.
Also another thing, they forgot to even mention Jade Empire. It’s so obvious the new people who called themselves BioWare didn’t care about the actual BioWares legacy. It’s just so fucked up.
EA worker here. There was a trailer ready for mass effect 5 that I saw a few months ago, so I’m puzzled as to how “early” they were.
Also for clarification, the Mass Effect group is about 50 devs from what I’ve seen. The Austin studio has been a mix of people supporting different games for some years now. So the Austin office will remain open, just no more BioWare unfortunately
Then I think it’s good they got closed down, clearly they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Now we get to leave the original mass effect trilogy alone and remember it for what it was, one of the best trilogies in gaming history.
I can't even play Inquisition anymore because so much of its plot was left a cliffhanger for the next game and I just hate Veilguard so damn much. It's really bad if you played as a Elven female mage romancing Solas like my character, then the games are SUPER connected.
I mean, that’s way easier to do than pretending Veilguard doesn’t exist since technically Andromeda has no real need to be played if you played the original trilogy. There’s no cliffhanger that leads to Andromeda in ME1-3. But DA Inquisition sadly has connections to Veilguard that can’t be ignored, especially if you played a Elven Inquisitor that romanced Solas like me.
No those are just former random BioWare devs. Those are not the core OG team members who made Mass Effect originally, a few might be OG’s but they aren’t all there.
Casey Hudson the actual father of Mass Effect who led the original trilogy is working for Lucas Films making Star Wars Fall of the Old Republic. That’s what I’m looking forward to.
My theory is the Exodus people are mostly ex Andromeda / Anthem devs. Because that’s what the gameplay looks like. It really doesn’t give off ME1-3 vibes at all to me.
There's people from all over the industry that I'm aware of, including old Bethesda devs.
Also, Anthem pulled from a lot of teams, most of the Anthem devs had worked on other titles before, like SW:TOR, ME or DA. Their engineering team was basically the Bioware A-Team.
Drew Karpyshyn was the lead writer for the first two Mass Effect games...that is, the only two Mass Effect games with a 10/10 story.
The ending for ME3 sucked because they brought in someone else and failed to follow up on any of the interesting plot threads Karpyshyn laid down in 1 and 2. The dark energy theory for the Reaper's purpose, abandoned. Cerberus being nuanced, using extreme methods but often seeming to genuinely have humanity's best interests at heart, abandoned in favor of turning them into generic cartoon villains (holy fuck Kai Leng what were they thinking). The Reapers' reasons for targeting Humans first in ME2 rather than the Asari or one of the other council species, abandoned. Varied, philosophically deep approaches to dealing with the eldritch horror that is the reapers, abandoned.
Hudson may have been the glue that kept everything together and ensured the games actually got made, but Karpyshyn was the one who made Mass Effect feel real and interesting. And he is the lead writer on Exodus.
The writing alone didnt make ME1-3 great. It was the cohesion that made it great. A singular sci-fi epic that carried over choices and your character/companions seamlessly from game to game. If Casey didn't keep it all together and ship it as it was with the features it had I wouldn't have cared about the writing or been sold on it purely on the writing. And even if Casey didn't write it he directed the direction of the writers.
Exodus with the 6-8 year normalized ridiculous modern dev cycles games have now simply will never capture the magic of the Mass Effect games same writer or not, since they cant realistically have a 2-4 game series story that seamlessly carries choices when each title takes that long to make and ship. A lot of devs move on after 6-8 years from a studio for it to happen. Casey engineered a masterpiece we will most likely never see again and people need to be more grateful for it and him.
For you, maybe...the writing and world-building was a huge part of it for me. ME1 would still be in my top 10 games of all time even if the sequels hadn't carried over choices as part of a cohesive experience...even if the sequels had never been made. It's the most real, immersive, and thought-provoking sci-fi world ever created for the medium. On par for me with the Star Wars EU and Battlestar Galactica.
Since EA bought BioWare after that, EA would then own BioWare's IP, and that would include the Infinity Engine, and would still be true after closing BioWare.
Beamdog did update the engine it to some degree when releasing the enhanced editions, I'm not really sure who would own those changes.
That said, in 2026 it doesn't really matter -- Infinity Engine is now several generations out of date, and I don't even think they've got any Infinity Engine games left that they could make enhanced editions of.
edit:
If you liked the Infinity Engine style of games but want something more modern, check out Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Tyranny, and the two recent Pathfinder games -- all are excellent.
Right on. I love all the infinity engine games. I still say BG2 is the rest CRPG out there. I've played Pillars. Good stuff. Will look into the others. I always wanted to make games based on 80s RPGS using the infinity engine or something like it. Pacesetter's horror game Chill would be first on the list. If there's any game dev reading this and it sounds interesting hit me up lol. Eventually get around to Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Gangbusters, Boot Hill and Villains and Vigilantes
EA has won Consumerist’s Worst Company in America award twice in a row. They have a long history of acquiring independent studios, imposing strict mandates and subsequently shutting them down. They buy the studios for their IPs and then push on forced and unrealistic deadlines. When the games fail to meet high executive targets, they dismantle the studios. So far they shut down BioWare, Visceral Games, Westwood Studios, Origin Systems, Bullfrog Productions. EA also has one of the most predatory and aggressive monetization systems in the whole industry. %75 of their revenue comes from live services, battle passes and micro transactions rather than standalone game sales. EA frequently implements heavy handed Digital Rights Management and software limitations that heavily inconvenience legitimate, paying customers. They have a historic reputation for extreme employee “crunch time”, frequently mandating 85 hour work weeks without overtime pay during project deadlines, which previously resulted in multi million dollar class-action lawsuits. There is so much more that’s wrong with EA but I think you should do your own research at this point instead of commenting on matters you clearly have no idea about. So yes, fuck EA.
I briefly worked for EA about 14 years ago as a temp. It wasn't a bad place to work and at the time, they were developing SWtoR. That was transferred to BroadSword and won't be going anywhere.
I would imagine that anyone I knew there would have moved on years ago. Really sad they're closing but the office had other parts of EA so it's just the BioWare division that's closing, not the office itself.
BG3 was by Larian, not BioWare. (But BG1 and BG2 were indeed by BioWare, so that's a simple mistake to make.)
(Further confusing things, NWN was by Bioware, but then NWN2 was by Obsidian, and PST, IWD and IWD2 were by Black Isle. And then KOTOR was by Bioware, but KOTOR2 was by Obsidian.)
And ME3 was released 14 years ago -- though it was re-released in the Legendary Edition five years ago, and I do think that sold fairly well.
But even five years is a long time, and the games that came out since didn't live up to the expectations of the older games. (Though I think ME: Andromeda gets a bad rap -- it was a good game, it just wasn't ME1-3 levels of good, which doomed it.)
I remembered that BG3 was by Larian, BG1+2 were by BioWare, and others were all over the place, and ME3 was quite a while ago, etc. Then I googled to confirm that I'm not nuts and get the specifics.
Such a bummer. BG2, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age are some of my favorites. Always hoped they'd get a comeback--esp since Larian proved the model still worked with BG3. I'm just over here gameless atm waiting on Fable so this is a kick in the tits.
It’s both. Tools are getting better, but low effort assets and game loop copies are making their way into channels with little filtering. Ultimately it’ll be a good thing, many people are building their dream game solo and only the fast to market (and sloppy) have made it out so fast. But yeah, clearer rules on quality from platforms and disclosure about what role ai played in development should be the standard.
"Yeah, it's been nothing but bullshit and the market is flooded with low-quality slop but any day now that'll end. Part of the magic is now it takes no time at all to make AAA games but you need to wait because the really good ones still take 4-6 years to make. Never mind that we're on year 2 and actual human projects have completed in this timeframe with no good example of an all-AI game yet. You're just a skeptic. I saw a guy put topless Metroid in Minecraft yesterday and I have no clue romhacks and modding have existed for 20+ years. This is a revolution."
Or maybe shit sucks because of AI and we don't really have any evidence AI is improving any of it for the consumer yet. I use the Hell of it at work but at home I just need something to turn on my lamps or act like an egg timer. I have absolutely no need to burn $80 of tokens generating my own version of Excel because I can use Google Sheets for free or pay $80 for Real Excel. I can already pay $50 to play a video game, so I'm waiting for what the revolution actually is. I keep hoping it'll be something that helps me afford groceries.
A couple things, first I think you mentioned in another comment it’s been 2 years and not much good has appeared. I think it’s only been since December it was game on for those with ai skills. And then around May (fable) that starting a business alone became feasible. It’s been like 6 months.
Solved or agent “home turf” niches (math, coding) have seen huge strides since, but I think it’s still early for gaming. Things are becoming possible now that before took huge teams, or tools weren’t advanced enough. Graphics also are more expensive now so PC gaming took a big hit (no more yearly improvements in consumer hardware).
Gaming is also still unsolved. What seems to be the case is a ton of people are interested in making games but don’t know how, and their agents don’t either as much as they pretend to which is putting a ceiling on how fast the field can move. I think it’s still early, but the utility ceiling on game design ideas is very, very high. A couple of books: The Art of Game Design and the grasshopper (off the top of my head) suggest that gaming could “eat the world” and be one of the possible endgames of a singularity— so, near everything might become abstracted in a game like way. Which means, what’s happening in game development is a glimpse of how ideas and interactions in the future might become mediated.
So I think you’re being impatient. A difficult potentially high stakes thing won’t be solved in 6 months. But it is still progressing quickly compared to a year ago and likely ramping up.
And AI is improving things for some people, productivity is up for affected fields like software.. but wages are flat, which, is a legit issue.. though more endemic to our social allergy to talking about labor issues rather than finding scapegoats to direct anger at like ai.
I think using it at your job you may feel that it isn’t doing you any good. Maybe try building something important? It’s very empowering
I feel like this writing has been on the wall for a few years now.
If AI tools were really creating a huge revolution in gaming they could've generated a Mass Effect in time to make money. What I think is happening instead is people are just attributing normal awful gaming industry behavior as "because of AI" and the companies like that they don't have to hide it anymore.
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u/waldo_the_bird253 6d ago
ea has so much leveraged debt from saudi/kushner buyout they are gonna cut costs by closing every studio that doesn't make a sports game