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cm0002 @lemmy.world

3w ago

BioWare has reportedly lost at least half its staff, with fewer than 100 people left and the studio a ghost of its former self

www.pcgamer.com BioWare has reportedly lost at least half its staff, with fewer than 100 people left and the studio a ghost of its former self

Instead of killing the golden goose, what if you slowly starved it to death over more than a decade.

BioWare has reportedly lost at least half its staff, with fewer than 100 people left and the studio a ghost of its former self

36 comments

Died when EA took over, now it's just a rotting corpse
- Everything EA touches dies. Fuck EA
  
  What about the sims
  Edit: heh
- The corpse puppets are multiplying in the industry.

We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.
Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.
Today’s news will see BioWare become a more agile, focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs.
https://blog.bioware.com/2025/01/29/bioware-studio-update/
Look how that turned out lol
- Agile focused? My god, they are doomed
  
  The whole thing reads as "we're on the verge of being shut down but the brand and IPs still have value, so we're given the bare minimum to push out ME5 and maybe get one more shot at a next game."
  
  How are they a credible game studio if they don't understand that there's treasure behind the waterfall?
- That message was 5 days ago. I have no love for Bioware or their actions, but maybe we need to wait a little while longer before deciding "how that turned out"?
- Nothing augurs success like hearing about the "incredible talent" that just went to "other teams at EA" 🙃

I have zero hope for me5
- Yeah the, “Don’t worry Me5 is being worked on by our good team” was hilarious. Why didn’t they give Me4 to their good team?

EA doesn't know how to predict a single player game's sales figures then gets mad when their crazy high expectations are met with only a merely slightly profitable game instead of wildly. Kills the studio rather than learning from mistakes.
Meanwhile GTA 6 is one of the most anticipated games of the decade and other single player studios are thriving. Hm what is the difference, what could it be?
- Odd you cited GTA6 in relation to single payer. GTA5 single player is a great experience but it's popularity and success is largely attributed to the multi player elements.
  
  GTA 5 sold for 800 million in the first day as a single player game. The multiplayer only shipped a whole year later. GTA 5s single player was a cut above the rest at the time.
  
  The entirety of the GTA series is popular because of its single player
- The quality of the games, specifically writing and story telling. Something broke by the time of ME3 and never healed.
  Technically, as in stability and execution, veilguard was extremely polished.
  
  As others have said, if it would have been “drake century”, noone would have minded. It just failed to be the dragon age from the origins era wanted

bioware has been dead for ages but EA is still shit
- Yeah, being bought by EA was considered a death sentence to good studios in the 90s already.

I don't understand why anyone expected anything different when DAV clearly did not do well.
Still can't believe they really thought it was going to be well received. They really thought they were cooking.
- It didn't do well because EA set them up to fail, as they have for years.

I don't think Bioware can cook anything good at this point, but I also think that a studio of 90-99 people should be more than enough to deliver a good RPG, as long as they drop the AAA graphics and focus way more on systems and writing. And it's not like the project can't scale up down the line, but it feels to me like it's a good idea to have less voices and a more concise/streamlined direction at the early scopes of making a game. We have had indie studio after indie studio showing that it's definitely more than possible to cook a masterpiece with 5, 10, 20 people. 100 people seems like a very reasonable number for starting a big project in that way.

I picked up Andromeda for my Series S recently because it was on sale for ~£3 or so. Never played it during its rough launch. I did play a little of the original ME games when I was hanging out with friends back in the day but not a super fan. Although I've spent a lot of time on Bioware's old Infinity Engine games.
I think that game might be underrated. This could just be a patient gamer moment but the writing is pretty good and I'm finding the initial sidequests to be immersive and compelling. Moment to moment gameplay is smooth too, with combat being a lot better than how I remembered the others to be. Interesting playing it when it was pretty much the beginning of the end for Bioware.

Bioware was a ghost of its former long before their staff was cut.

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