This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who has played BioWare’s RPGs for almost his entire life. “My hotel’s as clean as an elven arse!” remains one of his favourite NPC voice lines almost 30 years later.
In 2012 and 2013, EA was named the “Worst Company in America” in public polls held by Consumerist, beating out the likes of big oil, big pharma, and any other big corpo you can think of. During those years, the mega-publisher released Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and Mass Effect 3. Each of this trio of three-quels is in some way responsible for the company’s reputation at the time. Crysis was considered a rote follow-up, Dead Space’s microtransactions were seen as greedy, and disappointment over the finale of Mass Effect’s trilogy-concluding chapter provoked more outrage than many political scandals.
The idea that the early 2010s could be considered some of EA’s better years, then, should be absurd. But here we are. The colossal company’s latest 400 layoffs follow three subsequent years of severe cuts, including last year’s 300 staff, the cancellation of a Titanfall game, and the shuttering of Cliffhanger Games and its Black Panther project. In the surviving projects we can see just what EA values: annualised sports games with huge microtransaction revenue and live-service shooters with huge microtransaction revenue.
Video games at triple-A scale are, of course, a business. An industry. A means to make profit. Its role as a financial machine is why EA is now owned by a group of investors including Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. But it’s never felt more obvious that the suits who just deleted BioWare from a spreadsheet don’t care about the ‘arts’ in Electronic Arts. How far the company has fallen since 1983, when it asked “Can a computer make you cry?” in an advertisement promoting its creative ambition.
The more cynical parts of the internet see BioWare’s shuttering as something of a mercy, a failing studio put out to pasture. The putting down of a sick dog. And it’s true that the studio’s best days were seemingly behind it – its three most recent projects, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, were all disappointments to varying degrees. But while those most cynical voices accuse those within BioWare of betraying the studio’s roots, I think the issues lie squarely with EA. As IGN contributor Jeremy Peel wrote on social media yesterday, “I’ve chatted to enough veterans to know that BioWare succeeded despite EA’s ownership, not because of it. The studio steered a ship with a saboteur in the engine room.”
That’s not to say BioWare hasn’t made mistakes of its own. During an interview with IGN earlier this year, veteran Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah explained that Anthem was pitched internally as ‘the future of storytelling’ by Casey Hudson, the celebrated director of the Mass Effect trilogy and BioWare’s general manager through much of Anthem’s development. He remembers the mechsuit shooter being conceived as “What if we said it’s still BioWare, but it’s completely not BioWare?”
But is that attitude born of wanting to disintegrate years of RPG pedigree, or an attempt to secure survival within a ruthless publisher whose primary motivator is extraordinary money, not sustainable art?
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