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?
“They wanted every franchise to be a billion-dollar franchise”, Darrah said, noting EA’s internal goals for every franchise were to hit a minimum 40% profit margin, and for that to equate to $50 million in total profit. Even in its prime, BioWare wasn’t well positioned to achieve that. RPGs, particularly the grand, cinematic ones that made up BioWare’s most beloved era, are not cheap to produce. And, compared to the mass popularity of EA Sports’ annualised output, they’re quite niche.
Since it was acquired by EA in 2007, BioWare was constantly at the mercy of a parent company that had no interest in (and probably zero understanding of) role-playing games. You can see the battle in each successive game post-Mass Effect, with the crunchy RPG systems of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights stripped out in favour of more action, more linearity, more streamlined cinematic gloss. And, for a short while, that battle between EA’s demand for mass market products and BioWare’s desire to build first-class RPGs resulted in something special. Mass Effect 2 is one of the greatest games ever made because it balances blockbuster action with the deep character development and meaningful choices of the best D&D session.
But post Dragon Age: Inquisition, things began to fall apart. The disasters of Anthem and The Veilguard are well documented to be rooted in the difficult relationship between a single-player RPG studio and its Ultimate Team revenue-obsessed parent. And so after all it went through, it’s a miracle that The Veilguard even exists. But its fate as a bitter disappointment was, sadly, practically assured from the moment it began its troubled journey.
If BioWare was an isolated incident, it could be chalked up to EA mismanaging a studio that specialised in games it simply didn’t understand. But BioWare is only the latest in a long, long line of casualties. We can rewind as far back as the 1990s and find studios that it acquired, muddled, and eventually shuttered. Origin Systems. Bullfrog Productions. Kesmai. When EA acquired BioWare in 2007, it took on Pandemic Studios at the same time – the creators of the iconic Star Wars: Battlefront and destructive Mercenaries. Two years later it was gone.
But closure is simply one of the ugly fates that EA bestows on those it chews up. Over time, many studios are rebranded, reshuffled, and ingested into the big machine. Medal of Honor creator DreamWorks Interactive became part of EA in 2000 and within a few years it had been merged with what was left of Command & Conquer creator Westwood Studios (itself bought in 1998, closed in 2003). Renamed EA Los Angeles, the developer was put to work on Lord of the Rings and C&C strategy games, before then being re-badged as Danger Close and tasked with rebooting Medal of Honor to compete with Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare – an impossible task that sealed its miserable fate.
That reduction of studios to simple labour continues. Just this year we’ve seen Criterion, the racing games specialist EA bought in 2004, transformed into “A Battlefield Studio” – destined to work alongside three other studios on a multiplayer shooter franchise that’s a million miles away from its Burnout and Need for Speed roots. Only the very lucky (or very profitable) get to be ingested by EA and retain their personality, it seems.
I recently saw a Reddit thread that emphasised the importance of treating game developers like music bands rather than software companies. The OP suggested that, like a band, the original creatives are the studio and any change in staff or leadership equals the effective end of it. That’s perhaps a little too strict a definition for me personally, but I believe there’s more to that concept than individual people – like a band, a studio is a mantra. A creative philosophy. An artistic dream. Beneath all the HR paperwork and budget spreadsheets, studios have soul and purpose. That’s something that can be shared among new hires, passed down through generations, but it’s something that needs to be preserved. A studio is much, much more than a group of bodies to be thrown at whatever project is in need of staffing, to develop according to whatever trend is profitable, and that should be respected.
Sadly, that is not how the gears of private equity-financed corporations spin. And so just as BioWare wasn’t the first, I don’t expect it to be the last. As part of its plans for its next chapter, EA explained that while Motive’s Iron Man game and the third Star Wars Jedi are still in development, "beyond that, we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects." That sure sounds like EA’s interest in action-adventure games is dwindling, at least as far as internal development goes (its publishing of Hazelight’s co-op adventures, It Takes Two and Split Fiction, has proven commercially and critically successful, and so that kind of thing may continue). Respawn is already confirmed to be collaborating with DICE on a “future project”, so it feels only a matter of time until all of EA’s shooter studios are combined to become a homogeneous whole. And with that consolidation, EA will have finally streamlined into a company focused on annualised sports games with huge microtransaction revenue and live-service shooters with huge microtransaction revenue.
“Can a computer make you cry?” the company asked in 1983. Yes, but not in the way that advert intended.