With the closure of BioWare, a staple of Canadian game development for 30 years, people who you don’t usually expect to see weighing in on video games suddenly are. Usually it’s when a politician catches whiff of just how fucked things have become in the video game industry thanks to all the layoffs and consolidation that they start drawing attention to the corporate depravity that has infected the whole business. Avi Lewis, leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, has weighed in on the loss of the Edmonton-based Mass Effect studio and said that the Canadian government should step in to assist the employees of BioWare in buying and running the studio.
Lewis posted to his social media accounts that, despite all the conspiratorial nonsense suggesting that this happened because Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a non-binary character in it, the actual underlying reason BioWare has been shut down is because the studio’s parent company, EA, is now owned by private equity after its acquisition by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. Private equity acquisitions are pretty much never in the business of providing long-term support and fostering the conditions for success, but instead merely destroying things in the hopes of short-term profit while trampling over the people who actually know what the company needs. Lewis plainly states that this is what’s happening to EA after the acquisition went through in August, and BioWare is just one of the first of what will likely become many casualties down the line. He does, however, argue that there’s a potential solution: giving the team federal support to acquire the studio and continue working on the now-cancelled Mass Effect: Universe.
This is private equity, this is what it does.
Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit.
The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio. They know how to make the games we all love. They should be given the first opportunity – and the federal support – to buy it and run it themselves.
And if we want to avoid the Mass Effect effect in Canada, we should be keeping private equity out, not welcoming it in.
Is this all talk? Probably. Lewis may be an influential voice in Canadian politics, but he has no institutional power to nudge such a move forward. In general, a lot of people in politics love to post, and publicly throwing your support behind keeping private equity out of business is an easy way to earn some good PR and then move on with your day without a second thought. But it sure is a nice thought. Hell, I’d take a different publisher buying and reviving the studio as a solution if it meant BioWare got to live on and be left alone to work after a decade of internal sabotage from EA.