After the past five years of seemingly endless closures, cancellations, and restructures, after the tens of thousands of layoffs that the industry has endured like a relentless drumbeat, you’d think that we’d all have grown some pretty thick skin. How much can one more bad news story really hurt?
A lot, it turns out. Losing BioWare stings.
It’s not the sting of surprise, to be clear. The speed with which the newly private-equity-owned Electronic Arts moved to shutter the studio was unexpected, but the outcome was grimly predictable. The foundational logic of a private equity buyout is that some finance types have looked at a business and concluded that they can load it up with debt which it’ll pay back by slashing costs. BioWare was never likely to survive that process intact, if at all.
It’s not even, if we’re being honest, a sting of injustice, per se. The cutting of so many jobs at a studio (among a total of 400 being slashed across EA) alongside the cancellation of the project it was working on will never feel fair or right, especially when the decisions that led to it were so entirely out of the control of the talented people who now find themselves facing unemployment. But in a broader view, if the knife had to fall somewhere (which it did not), you can see why it fell here.
The BioWare being snuffed out this week isn’t the BioWare now being lamented so widely. It’s still a studio of remarkable, skilled, passionate people, but it’s a studio that hasn’t had a critical or commercial hit in over a decade – the (genuinely phenomenal) Dragon Age: Inquisition was the last flash of real BioWare magic. It doesn’t look good on paper, and paper is all that the people making these decisions look at.
To make things worse, the new Mass Effect game the studio was working on was described as being in “early development”, despite its first trailer being shown almost six years ago. “Early development” is a vague term, but for a big AAA game like this it implies that release was still several years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and probably a hardware generation away. An expensive long-term gamble on a franchise whose last outing didn’t do well and which doesn’t sit neatly into the sport, military shooter, and live service buckets that EA’s new owners actually seem interested in – those odds were never going to work out.
What stings isn’t even just nostalgia for the incredible studio that BioWare was for such a long time. The studio of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, games which more or less resurrected Dungeons & Dragons from cultural limbo, without which pop-culture phenomena like Stranger Things simply wouldn’t exist. The studio of Knights of the Old Republic and my personal favourite, Jade Empire. The studio that, even after being bought by legendary mis-manager and destroyer of talented studios Electronic Arts, still released Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
From 1998 to 2014, BioWare had a run that I’m not sure any other development studio has ever equalled. The notion that it’s now gone (or worse, that it now exists only as a disembodied piece of IP, a brand-name that will eventually be dusted off and skin-puppeted about by private equity ghouls) is certainly hard to swallow, even if its halcyon days were quite a long time ago.
No, what really stings isn’t the loss, or the single decision that ended the studio’s existence. It’s the nigh-on decade and a half of decisions that led here; the gruesome mismanagement of an iconic, fabulously creative studio. It’s the litany of bad choices and trend-chasing and interference.
Most of all, it’s the grinding, awful familiarity of it – the knowledge that the song of how BioWare died is one that most of the rest of the industry can hum the tune of by heart, even if the specific lyrics change a little. This happens over and over again, and the people who ought to learn, never learn, because they’re never the ones having to brush up their CVs and think about how long their emergency savings will last.
The private equity acquisition of EA was only the final coup de grace to a studio that had already taken body blows from every awful trend the games industry has experienced in the past couple of decades. With the clarity of hindsight – unfair as that might be – you can already start to see the seeds of disaster in the weird attempts to make multiplayer modes a core part of the Mass Effect franchise. It was odd even at the time, but now it looks like a clear indication of how uncomfortably the industry’s most celebrated creator of story-driven, single-player experiences would sit within the structure of the eternally trend-chasing EA.
EA decreed that single-player games must be made multiplayer, no matter how ill-fitting that was
That was the era in which plenty of publishing execs convinced themselves that single-player gaming was on the way out, so EA decreed that single-player games must be made multiplayer, no matter how ill-fitting that was or how much of a distraction from the core development effort it became. (Mass Effect arguably got off lightly compared to the Dead Space franchise, at least.)
This was only a prelude to the real disaster, of course; by the time live service became the trend to chase, BioWare had seen the departure of many of its veteran leaders, including co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, and with them any hope of an anchor against the buffeting winds of EA’s commands. There’s a pretty strong argument that BioWare actually died with the failure of its massively expensive live-service flop, Anthem. That disaster really left only a shell stumbling forward with little consistent direction until another game originally intended to be live service before being hastily reworked, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, limped out the door in 2024.
Veilguard will now be BioWare’s last game. It’s not a good game, but also not entirely as bad as people make out. I finished it, which is actually a somewhat rare accolade these days, and found it to be a fascinating mess that’s really an apt summary of everything that had gone wrong for the studio under EA mismanagement. Some parts are beautiful, atmospheric, and superbly written; two minutes later you can be in the midst of slapdash nonsense listening to painful dialogue that clearly never felt the gentle caress of an editor’s pen. The seams where the whole thing was stitched together from multiple iterations of very different games, including the mad, awful idea of a live service Dragon Age title, are impossible to miss.
It’s a shambling, stitched-together monster of a thing, scarred by bad decisions and traumatised by constant shifts in creative direction, animated by fascinating glimmers of creative talent and still, ultimately, far less than the sum of its mismatched parts. It’s a game that could only have been made by a studio being ordered to pursue different goals and visions from week to week to week; no mad auteur could ever dream up such a perfect encapsulation of mismanagement and executive folly.
The gap between the extraordinary focus, polish, and clarity of vision seen in BioWare’s best games and the sense of complete inconsistency and uncertainty about itself seen in Veilguard (let alone the almost total lack of character and depth in Anthem five years earlier) tells a clear and tragic story. The creative staff at BioWare didn’t suddenly forget how to make good games, or how to write good dialogue, design good combat systems, or build intriguing worlds. The entire framework that’s required to actually do that needs stability, consistency, and clear direction that aligns with the creative values of the project – none of which EA ever provided to the studio.
The real tragedy is how ordinary this particular brand of villainy has become in this industry
Is EA the villain that killed BioWare? Ultimately, yes – yet another trophy from a legendary studio to go on its grisly serial killer’s wall – but the real tragedy is how ordinary this particular brand of villainy has become in this industry, especially when private equity is there to put a knife in its hand. Giving the goose what it needs to keep laying golden eggs is just beyond the ken of a great many people in decision-making positions. That doesn’t mean buying studios and then just leaving them to their own devices (Microsoft seems to have attempted something like that during the Phil Spencer era, with disastrous results of its own). But there must be some middle ground between that and carving off cuts of a fowl while occasionally stopping to complain that you haven’t seen a golden egg lately.
I don’t have a smart solution or pithy suggestion to close on. The studio that made some of my favourite games ever is gone, and 400 people have lost their jobs. Many of the people who made the worst decisions along the way to this sad ending have probably done very nicely out of the private equity deal that brought the final hammer down, and thus will learn nothing, because nobody ever learns from mistakes that someone else pays the price for. Raise a glass to BioWare, but leave a dram in the bottle, because it won’t be the last time you’ll need it.