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There is something so soul crushing about creating art that pushes the needle in the games industry, only to be thanked by using the capital gained from said art to push the ones who created it out of a job.

Aftermath@aftermath.site

Electronic Arts closing BioWare, laying off hundreds: aftermath.site/electronic-art...

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Our society has centered money over any other value. Art is seen as a lucky byproduct and I hate this view. At this point in human existence why is money so much more important than preserving and displaying the joy of living and connecting with others.

A couple decades ago I did a little work for a games studio that was made up of people whose last studio had been bought out and broken up by EA. They had a poster on the wall to comemorate who evil EA was. Predation a problem with big companies in general, but EA has been especially bad for awhile

Yeah, the way vulture capitalists have managed to fuck over creative industries is terrible. They don't care about experience, skills and legacy. Just their own wealth. 🙁

I loved old Bioware but this is just putting down a zombified husk at this point. Everyone that worked on the games I loved had left long ago. I don't blame the developer of course, EA has a whole graveyard full of studios they have bought and destroyed over time in the same way.

At one job, I did a project for a client where my contribution was 16 drawings. Automation was involved, but all done by me. The estimate for the client was 40 hours a drawing. I wasn’t told that. Next project for that client, it was 25. Since the “assembly line” was set up, easy. Raise for me? Nope

It’s why STEM majors & Arts majors need to put aside our differences to unite & do battle w/our common enemy: business majors. STEM & Arts majors know actual useful info; business majors only know the cost of everything & the value of nothing.

The reason everything’s going to shit is B/C business majors are running everything as opposed to people who actually know anything. Like you no longer have engineers in charge at Boeing, just finance bros. Hence why the planes are falling apart. You can easily dredge up more examples of this.

The people who pushed the needle had been gone for a decade due to mismanagement of the company. This sucks, but it was just a shell with some nostalgia IP at this point

Yeah - people who paid attention saw the writing on the wall after ME:Andromeda. The broader fan-base had it all but confirmed after Anthem. And DA:Veilguard was just the whimpering death-rattle of the company.

I blame Jared and the Saudi elite, for clearly they hold the reins over a video game dev company and - holy fuck, oh my god, we actually live in a timeline where this is the case.

This is exactly why art needs a different type of industry that never sells out for money gold and riches and animations and games need to be released into the public domain instead of sold and hoarded into lost media forever. Companies do not care about creations. They care about the bottom-line.

Hey don't worry, if you make a soulless yet successful cash-grab of a game you'll also have your job taken from you. So everyone can share that fate.

As much as I know that this will only lead to the company’s own demise, the money needed to make masterpieces like this prevent the original artists from just doing it on their own. Meaning, they’re forced to repeat this process at another company that promises to be different.

And with layoffs and closures like these happening industry-wide, there's not even enough companies hiring to absorb the talent that was cast aside. So many have to abandon the dream of making games altogether, leading to a generational loss of subject matter expertise.

Unionize. Strike. It's not like the people buying the product aren't explicitly on your side. Tech has an inherent bias that attracts loners/self-starters. Somebody needs to organize all of you if we're not breaking out the guillotines.

Feels at one point one needs to fund their own publisher without incentive for infinite growth that can risk funding these huge projects.

I think they thanked them with nearly 20 years of employment, opportunity, and resources. Where they just supposed to keep wasting that on a studio that hasn't delivered something that pushes the needle in over 15 years?

I think it would be safe to say that corporate mismanagement led to the talent drain at Bioware, as well as the tortured development of their last few games. It's a mercy killing at this point, but dozens of studios under the EA umbrella have followed the same course.