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EA’s BioWare will lay off 50 and cut ties with unionized Keywords playtesting group
(venturebeat.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Yeah, I won’t believe it’s actually shipping until I see it for sale on store shelves. I literally said, “Because it won’t” when I read that line.
At this point, if BioWare survives long enough to ship Dreadwolf, I’ll be surprised.
I think it'll ship, because EA has probably sunk a lot into it already. But there will also be a huge amount of pressure for it to make a shitload of money so it'll most likely release half-finished and loaded with microtransaction nonsense.
Then there will most likely be a backlash like there was with Anthem and possibly Bioware will limp along for a bit, maybe become a support studio for someone else for a while, but I don't really see them making another big game after this, at least in their current form.
There was talk of a new Mass Effect game IIRC but that could really be made by any of EA's studios, it's not like anyone who made the originals special will still be at Bioware anyway.
EA is not a believer in the sunk cost fallacy.
I'm a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).
They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.
This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There's an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn't like movie tie-ins one day.
There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.
Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.
Man, Black Flag would have been even better as a Pirates of the Caribbean game.
Black Flag without the real-world stuff would have been great. I need to see if there's a good pirate game out there. I played Sid Meir's Pirates! or whatever it was called, but a 3D pirate game like Sea of Thieves, but single player.. hmm.