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Going to give my own takeaway on the demise of Bioware, which still makes me very sad. The TLDR: Bioware was not killed suddenly by a private equity acquisition. It was slowly strangled by idiots who didn't understand what made Bioware great - some at EA but also some inside of Bioware leadership

My perspective, I worked there for ... 8 years? I was in the Austin office, where I was lead systems designer on SWTOR, led the free-to-play monetization, was lead designer for an xpac, and then worked on some prototypes that didn't go anywhere (note: most prototypes don't).

Bioware games are great because of story. That's it. They made it their mission early on to be the best storytelling games in the industry, with a single-minded mission to truly advance the state of the art of branching dialogue and the sense that player's actions have consequences.

But this didn't sit well with some of the decision makers. The earliest Bioware games were basically turn-based RPGs and then pause-and-play RPGs. This was, in the opinion of these people, old and busted. So you got Jade Empire, and then Mass Effect and then Dragon Age 2 (the 'action RPG' one).

The end result is that the budgets for these games ballooned. The schedules for these games became impossible to predict. The teams - who I want to stress were some really smart people - were in a situation to build all-new tech and 'find the fun' in a new combat model that didn't exist before.

By contrast, if you asked the Creative Director of Bioware what his favorite project was, it was Baldur's Gate 2. Because it basically was the Baldur's Gate 1 engine with an all-new story. Tech changes were small and highly targeted. All effort could go towards telling a great story.

Now, keep in mind, I'm the only non-Bioware veteran lead designer on SWTOR (we had 5 subleads), so I was the guy who was all 'your single player tricks won't work in an MMO'. But even I knew that story was at the core of SWTOR - and we had 8 pretty good bioware stories for 8 classes!