Wow…

BioWare is closing after more than 30 years, and the next Mass Effect has been cancelled in early development. Before you decide Dragon Age did this, look at what else EA announced on the same day.

The studio’s statement said BioWare has been more than a studio, that it’s been a home for storytellers and developers and the players who brought those worlds to life, and that after three decades of shared adventures the studio is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.

Everyone is going to point at Dragon Age, and I can speak to that one. I actually played it. It was not good. Odd direction, and not just the story that everybody fixated on. Take the story and the character designs out entirely and look at the gameplay, how linear it was, the overall design, and it still falls short by Dragon Age’s own standards. I went in trying to find what I could grab onto, the way I always do. I have a reputation for hating everything that has never been true, most of my movie reviews were positive, and I was arguably the most fair reviewer of a movie like New Mutants. This one was just hard to find something to hold.

But here is the thing. BioWare is not the only cut. A new Sims game was cancelled the same day. skate. is continuing with a smaller team. The money is staying with sports, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi, a new Iron Man game and Battlefield. That is not one studio dying from one bad game. That is a company deciding which bets it is willing to keep funding, and the ones that survived are the dependable annual earners.

On the people: do not read this as the end of an era for game developers. They move laterally in this industry, they always have, and that is what “through this transition” means. Most of them will land somewhere, probably making something similar under a different name.

Thirty years is a long run for any company. There were duds. Anthem had something there and the long term support never showed up to finish the idea. Eventually the shot callers decide they cannot keep putting money into it and they make an adjustment.

The AAA market is going to look very different in a few years. This is part of that.