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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).

All these are good and well - and the Mass Effect series in particular was a great game - but each of these required Bioware to build game types they hadn't built before, which tacked uncertainty on top of the story stuff which is, frankly, stupid expensive on its own.

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!

But then Bioware went into its Games as a Service phase. SWTOR worked out pretty well - because the game design was able to keep story as a focus. But Anthem always felt off-mission. (Note: it shipped long after I left). And it took a long time to build because it was outside their core skills.

I worked with lots of ex-BioWare folks and it was wild how many times I discovered a contempt for the narrative department as taking up too many resources and getting too much attention that should’ve been directed elsewhere. How do you run the narrative-famous studio and let that happen???

The rumours that EA was going to shut down Bioware have been swirling for YEARS now. Bioware games don't make great Games as a Service (ignore that SWTOR made billions of dollars please) and story-based RPGs don't sell. Time to turn the lights off.

And in the middle of all that, Larian Studios ships Baldur's Gate 3, makes a shit ton of money and wins ALL the awards. Which tells you a lot about corporate intelligence.

Anyway, I really do believe the flame of Bioware will live on in studios like Larian. I actually think that story-based games are among the most likely to survive the industry pivot towards AI. Because whatever else AI does well, great game writing is not it.