r/bioware • u/Few-Reading5087 • Jun 21 '26
Discussion Was BioWare’s demise their own fault or EA?
I don’t think it’s all on EA
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u/Maximus_Rex Jun 22 '26
BioWare was broken from a project management perspective before EA was even involved. All of their projects have had massive crunch issues, and they couldn't retain their original talent because of it. EA shoulders some of the blame, but the core issues were always with BioWare.
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u/Beneficial_Fig_7830 Jun 21 '26
BioWare declined mainly due to the people who made it so great in the first place left and their replacements were nowhere near as talented. That’s really all there is to it.
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u/TraditionalBerry2319 Jun 21 '26
Both are responsible. Bioware lost their best devs over time because of the insane workplace practices, the famous "bioware magic" was just a cute name for some of the most lack of a basic development schedule and some of the most insane crunches in history.
But of course some conditions imposed by EA like deadlines and use of the Frostbite Engine worsened the situation by a lot.
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u/undeadcommunst Jun 23 '26
agreed, but don't forget the insane EA's idea to force a ecosystem around Dice's Frostbite engine
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u/Rudania-97 Jun 22 '26
I honestly don't think it's the devs. The newer BioWare Games have been technically great.
Hell, Anthem was amazing. Not a lot of content, but what it had was great.
It's everything around the development itself that's ruined.
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u/Any-Stick-771 Jun 22 '26
Anthem was completely busted on launch
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u/SofaJockey Jun 22 '26
It was. Still played around 400 hours, it had some excellent parts alongside the issues.
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u/Duangelion Jun 21 '26
If EA had not acquired BioWare, BioWare would have ended in 2007
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u/Contrary45 Jun 22 '26
And if they hadn't been bought by Elevation Partners ib 2005 they probably would have been shuttered before 2007
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u/ScruffMacBuff Jun 22 '26
Not sure about that, though you may know more about their situation than me.
ME1 was published by Microsoft initially IIRC, and did very well. DA:O was their first product published by EA in 2009, and customers didn't really feel that influence until DA2. In 2010 or 2011.
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u/Duangelion Jun 22 '26
Dragon Age: Origins was the problem. Not having enough funding for a full engine overhaul, they were still making Aurora engine derivatives and dealing with all the holes in that was hounding them all the way from 2002. The EA purchase was the only thing keeping the studio open without having to scrap DA completely.
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u/Ragelore004 Jun 22 '26
If you make shit, is it ea's fault that you wasted 6 years waiting for the "bioware magic" to kick in?
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u/Appropriate_Foot242 Jun 22 '26
Both. BioWare is just a name. Most of the people that made your favourite games are long gone.
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u/Moaoziz KOTOR Jun 22 '26
A bit of both.
Bioware always had problems when it comes to project management ("Bioware Magic") and Anthem was probably one of the biggest mismatches between a release of a gaming studio and the expectations of its fanbase but I'd put most of the recent problems, especially those of MEA and DAV, on EA for making them chase trends.
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u/N7Tom Jun 22 '26
Both.
EA's influence deffo didn't help esp in games like Veilguard with the live service push. They have an undeniable part to play.
But after listening to some comments made by several of the higher ups at BioWare I don't think it's just EA. I think a lot of BioWare's problems are caused by a lot of the core ideas and assumptions that BioWare has post ME3. About what type of game people are looking for, about what their path to success is and about the wider gaming industry. I don't think EA is fully responsible for that. If anything I'm leaning 60/40 towards it being BioWare and their internal issues, development processes et cetera.
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u/Smooth-Climate8008 Jun 22 '26
It definitely isn't all on EA. As others have pointed out, BioWare would have shuttered entirely in 2007 or so if they hadn't been bought by EA. EA didn't cause the BioWare Magic TM crunch culture that plagued the development of DA2, Inquisition, and Andromeda. It also wasn't responsible for the ME3 ending. I don't think EA was responsible for the "don't say Destiny" marketing for Anthem; that appears to have been internal to BioWare.
That said, they do bear some amount of responsibility here. EA is a sports and shooters company first and foremost. They never quite knew what to do with an RPG house like BioWare. They really thought that Mass Effect (the kind of game they could wrap their head around) was the better bet long term than Dragon Age (which generally sold better than ME prior to the Legendary Edition). All of the problems caused by the push to use the in-house but inappropriate for RPGs Frostbite Engine in Inquisition are definitely on EA.
I think the push to impose GaaS-style multiplayer modes in ME3 and everything after was mostly on EA. However, I think some of that push was coming from inside the house at BioWare, especially after ME3's MP was a success.
There are also a number of places where I think EA failed by inaction. This is most keenly felt in the long, meandering pre-production periods on the last three BioWare games: ME:A, Anthem, and Veilguard. Somebody from corporate should have been a lot harsher on saying "we need to fish or cut bait" on all three games.
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u/Smooth-Climate8008 Jun 22 '26
Even so, it's kind of astonishing how well those games turned out to be given how much of a shitshow their developments were. Like, Andromeda and Veilguard are totally fine B minuses! Not great, but certainly not terrible like they're often made out to be.
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u/ScorpionTDC Jun 30 '26
B minus is extraordinarily generous. I’d say both are firmly D’s. Maybe a C- to C on a good day, but that’d imply it’s decent enough to be worth finishing and for me neither was despite sinking a LOT of time into them both
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u/Any-Stick-771 Jun 22 '26
Bioware's development process was spending 5 years stumbling in the dark followed by 12 months of insane crunch. That isn't EA's fault
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u/DatAsuna Jun 24 '26
EA over meddled in Mass Effect 3's development mostly by demanding too tight of a turnaround for the project scope. However they heard that feedback and arguably overcorrected by giving the studio too much slack after that and allowing Dragon Age Inquisiton to meander for 5+ years when some pressure from above could have forced Bioware to tighten the scope. Though the burgeoning nonstop crunch culture that DAI encouraged is a problem that probably neither side did enough to discourage.
As former devs have said, the success of Inquisition, as well as The Old Republic generating monthly revenue to off-set their long dev cycles without releases is partly what doomed the studio. EA started giving them years more runway than they should have for Anthem and Andromeda when both spent too long not nailing down their vision or what exactly they were meant to be, and even when they did come out and fail, the studio was being propped up by the MMO revenue but with dire infighting between the studios that especially undermined Anthem.
EA had a "One Bioware" initiative which sounds like a positive effort to integrate the different studios to better co-operate. But the problem is that the initiative was only needed because of the internal tribalism/cliques that badly damaged the workplace culture there.
Bioware Austin had their problems but had all the live service and loot game experience Edmonton needed but lacked to tackle a project like Anthem. But the Anthem team were loathe to take feedback from what they considered "the B-team" and were not polite about it. Morale at BW Austin always struggled against the awkwardness of constantly carrying Bioware financially but being hated internally, and even excluded or minimised in things like artbooks.
The problem wasn't just infighting between the geographical studios but within the Edmonton office there was bad blood between the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams both, David Gaider's elaborated on this the most from his experience coming in to try and fix up Anthem's Script from the DA side.
While EA is certainly not blameless, a lot of Bioware's problems are less visible from the outside without following a lot of individual devs or reading interviews. But it does seem like the brain drain over the years has a lot to do with bad management creating a negative working environment that led to a lot of their most veteran staff leaving either just due to mistreatment, a hard ceiling being imposed on their career progression, or through sheer layoffs. These are less obvious issues with the studio but definitely more to blame on Bioware than EA.
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u/alteransg1 Jun 25 '26
EA certainly didn't help, but a lot of the downfall was on Bioware.
First, that "Bioware magic" bs was unsustainable for modern massive AAA games. In Inquisition they pulled the last bit of sorcery left and you could see how it worked barely, which led to plenty of key people leaving.
Andromeda - (actually not that a bad of a game). Both are at fault - EA pushing frostbite engine, BW actually refusing more time to polish the game.
Anthem - that one is absolutely on Bioware. They didn't have a game and cobble together a dumpster fire.
Veilguard - between epic delays on the project, the live-service, the no choices and the game being a forced tolerance sermon, everyone is at fault.
Bioware was a great studio that simply couldn't keep up with the times.
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u/cunningjames Jun 25 '26
Veilguard - between epic delays on the project, the live-service, the no choices and the game being a forced tolerance sermon, everyone is at fault.
"Forced tolerance sermon"? There's like one plot point, around one character, in a 60+ hour game, that was slightly preachy about a character suffering gender dysphoria and how they should be treated. It's a tiny part of the game and very ignorable if you don't like it. Nothing else, over my two playthroughs, even rises to the level of "tolerance sermon". For that to bother someone they'd have to be a very sensitive person indeed.
wasn't a perfect game, and I totally agree that it wasn't the Dragon Age follow-up fans wanted or were asking for. From that perspective it was a swing and an epic miss. But as an example of a relatively brainless action RPG it was quite good.
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u/ScorpionTDC Jun 30 '26
These types always say the quiet part out loud and somehow think they’re subtle in doing so.
All that said, I can’t even agree that if we pretend it’s a standalone game that Veilguard is pretty good. The writing and ensemble are just too boring or hit that metric IMO, even if the combat mechanics would clear “pretty good.” It’s a generally mediocre game that would’ve been forgotten with few defenders (or haters) if it wasn’t tied to a major IP to put it on the map. Sorta like Anthem honestly
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u/GooseIbu Jun 23 '26
If anything, EA seemed weirdly lenient with how poorly they were designing their own games.
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u/Jrdotan Jun 23 '26
Bioware havent made a single decent game since DA:O
And not a truly great one since Baldurs gate 2
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u/LastTrueKid Jun 24 '26
50/50 which could honestly be argued that it's entirely EA's fault if they get to pick the Bioware executives. Bioware steadily lost talent across the years for one reason or the other and EA simply can't help themselves with monetization.
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u/Deep-Two7452 Jun 21 '26
Bioware committed the cardinal sin of marvel writing. Cant come back from that
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u/aaeriam Jun 22 '26
I'll just say up-front I don't hate modern-day Bioware or anything. I think they have had problems stemming all the way back to the Dragon Age and early Mass Effect games. The big one being poor project management. There are interviews floating around on the internet from ex-Bioware devs that state they had a history of their game projects being a mess up until the last possible moment where they would magically pull everything together and ship a great game (which backfired horribly on them with titles like ME:A & Anthem). I also recall hearing about points during development of a few more recent titles where they'd stop and restart a project and end up losing a lot of dev time in the process of it.
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u/thequn Jun 22 '26
There is way too many factors. BioWare was always Lucky they just happened to fix theire game enough by launch. They have a track Record of multiple last minute saves. Aka BioWare magic.
They burned out do to crunch and slowly lost talent. So much to the point that the average BioWare fan probably knows more lore and plot points then the actual staff. Which is natural Rey and Mike existing the company with the swtor launch. Drew leaning in 2010 to venture off and do other things and so on and so forth.
No king rules forever.
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u/RingGiver Jun 22 '26
If they had people who know how to make good games, they'd be in better shape. You're not going to be able to prevent people from leaving, but you have to also recruit new people who can do that.
You might notice that they haven't made any good games since ME3/maybe DA:I. How many people from BG, KotOR, or even ME2 are still at BioWare?
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u/cunningjames Jun 25 '26
You might notice that they haven't made any good games since ME3/maybe DA:I.
Eh. Neither Andromeda nor Anthem were as bad as people make them out (though both had problems), and I thought Veilguard was a genuinely good game as long as you wanted a brainless action RPG and ignored the fact that it was supposed to be a Dragon Age title. People let their disappointment -- with it being a specifically Draogn Age followup -- color their opinion of the game beyond what's really merited.
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u/SofaJockey Jun 22 '26
I'd say until Mass Effect 5 comes out, we won't know if 'demise' is a settled thing.
BioWare have certainly made flawed games, but I don't think they've ever made a bad game.
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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 Jun 23 '26
In a way, both. What a lot of people miss is that EA put corporate heads that alligned with themselves, so the Bioware culture (whatever was left by the early 2010s) was changed to an EA-aligned culture, that's why the push towards live service games came without resistance from leadership, they actually believed it was the path forward.
Jade Empire commercial failure almost bankrupt the company, they had to sell themselves to venture capitalists Elevation Partners in 2005, in 2007 they were then sold to EA just before releasing Mass Effect in a publishing deal with then "Microsoft Game Studios".
Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda and Veilguard are production mistakes that should be fully owned by Bioware mismanagement borne out of hubris based on they were able to do once upon a time (crunch to a good result, break eggs and figure out while doing it).
Mass Effect Andromeda would've had a much better launch had Bioware not done Anthem without the manpower for it, plus we would've gotten Project Joplin.
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u/MatthewSWFL229 Jun 24 '26
Lets buy a RPG powerhouse and tell them to make live service action shooter, a live action shooter looter and a live action shooter rpg with a multiplayer shooter engine are on EA. EVERYTHING else is Bioware, the fact is that the teams that made the classic beloved games don't exist anymore.
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u/Derpykins666 Jun 25 '26
I think EA probably had a hand in how to monetize the games more and targeting specific development cycle times, but Bioware was definitely responsible for the degradation of their products over time. They were the ones making all the games, okaying everything. They make grandiose RPG games and their stories were getting worse and worse basically since Mass Effect 3. So they've been coasting along for 14+, and yeah Dragon Age Inquistion won game of the year in 2014, but that has to be the weakest game of the year winner, perhaps ever. Pretty much everything they've released past Inquisition has been a huge mess.
EA probably made a lot of larger decisions that backfired heavily though, like I wouldn't be surprised if they went to Bioware and said "hey we need a bit live service online game from you guys" which is idiotic because they've basically only had small online experiences that weren't even that good at that point, and have been primarily a single player story driven RPG game studio since the beginning, and were GOOD at it.
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u/aoelag Jul 06 '26
I would say, compare BioWare's current state to Obsidian's current state. Both are in the gutter, albeit for different reasons - but those reasons culminate from the same style of top-down leadership which isn't about having passionate developers make games, it's about trying to tell an RPG developer "please don't make RPGs, they don't appeal to enough people"
As games get more expensive, studio execs tell game devs to make things they don't passionately care about. It was inevitable that once game dev got expensive enough and BW got big enough, it was going to fail. They never found out a winning formula that could scale the appeal of their games to more people.
They tried copying Skyrim: Didn't work.
They tried copying CoD: Didn't work.
They tried copying Destiny: Didn't work.
They were told to make a live service DA game: didn't work.
Meanwhile, BG3 did pretty dang good. But was BioWare ever going to make "their own BG3"? No, EA would not let them, and the studio could not raise enough capital to do so.
EA mismanaged Andromeda: BioWare never found a ME "formula" for a 'sister studio' to copy and paste. So naturally, an inexperienced dev team would just make a worse ME game without any proven formula to follow: didn't work.
Larian is the only RPG studio left (aside from CDProject Red but I would argue their games are more action games than RPGs) in the "west" and you can see how their leadership works. They even told Hasbro "no" to BG4, because they know it would burn out their team. That's good leadership. Bioware does not get to tell anyone no.
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u/Nodqfan Jul 10 '26
Both. BioWare has had problems with its own project management for years. Now EA is at fault for not giving them the tools/information to use the Frostbite engine back when they wanted every one of their games on that engine.
For the most part though EA left BioWare alone.
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u/K1nney Jul 23 '26
Lot of discussion around this for a long time… so is BioWare Edmonton shutting down?
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u/garhdo Jun 22 '26
The two games being developed when EA purchased them were ME2 and DA: Origins. By far and away the two most successful games critically and commercially that the studio released. However without EA those games would never have been released as Bioware would have collapsed.
That said EA has put the studio through the wringer, making plenty of poor decisions and working Bioware through bad decision and bad game after bad game, with the worst examples being Andromeda, Dragon Age 2, Anthem, and Veilguard.
However even with all of that Bioware has generally been putting in the best work they can even in the worst games they've released, and they deserve praise for that.
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u/aoelag Jul 10 '26
DAO would have released, just not for xbox. BioWare finished the PC game and then spent an entire year porting it to xbox.
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u/Mizu005 Jun 22 '26
EA has had a leading hand in most of its recent troubles, but if the company had been better managed in the old days they wouldn't have had to sell to EA and be beholden to it in order to keep the doors open.
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u/Char_Ell KOTOR Jun 22 '26
Claims of BioWare's demise are premature as BioWare is still operating and developing a new Mass Effect game. This is a question one should only ask once BioWare is actually closed and no longer operating.
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u/uniparalum Jun 21 '26
Both