Just an amusing observation about that image. Ah yes, "METRO", the prestigious and highly regarded experts in all matter video games. Best known for their littering of London (and any public transport in and out of) on a daily basis with rubbish; a free, daily tabloid newspaper. A trusted review source, indeed.

They could if they'd actually learn some lessons from their own biggest flops and change their business model.

The smaller development studios that haven't yet been gobbled up by a gigantic publisher like EA or Microsoft can still to this day make a healthy profit off of even average games that they make with a fraction of the money and staff. So the big companies should be able to do the same thing without bloating every release into something that costs tens of millions of dollars to make, requires hundreds of staff to build, and has to sell five million copies in order to turn a profit.

If the bigger companies would show a little more restraint and pay a little more attention to the fans of the games they're making, they could stop the cycle of spending millions of dollars and years of development time on games that they end up canceling because they don't see enough of a future profit margin in them, and also releasing games that sell millions but still get labeled a failure because it's not ENOUGH millions.

I firmly believe it comes down to corporate greed. Offhand, I cannot think of a single game studio that has been able to continue putting out the quality of games they were known for when they were still independent once they get bought up by a big publisher. As a smaller studio, they're usually run by people who love gaming and make the games they want to play. Once EA or some other giant is running the show, it ends up becoming strictly about the profit margins, no matter how much the people in the formerly-independent studio might wish otherwise. They have to answer to a higher master than what they think would be fun to play, and they're rarely free to do things the way they want anymore. Even when it starts out that way, it almost never lasts.

I've used Maxis as an example in other threads here; as many people will remember, they were the studio behind SimCity, The Sims, and most other Sim-something titles back in the day. Not all of their games were giant successes like the first couple versions of SimCity, but they had enough success to be a profitable company, valued at $125 million when EA bought them in 1997 (which would be close to $250 million today). Maxis technically still exists, but very little remains of the original company. All of its studios have been closed, and it is so thoroughly integrated with EA thanks to the Sims franchise that for all intents and purposes, the studio that was Maxis no longer exists. What does exist basically does whatever papa EA tells them to.

There are so many other similar stories where the studio in question is simply gone, as are the games or franchises they were known for. BioWare is well on its way to being the next. Most of what the studio once was is long gone, and it shows in their more recent game releases.

True. Clueless moneymen moving into anything, not just gaming, often spells doom.

There are some exceptions occasionally. For a recent example - Warhorse with Kingdom Come, where the extra money from a big publisher clearly showed in the scope and quality of the sequel. But even then, the budget was still mostly reasonable at the supposed $40 million. Which is about the max of what I'd expect from a major production. Not the ludicrous multiple hundreds of millions of some of the recent big flops.

But again, for every positive example, there are like 5 bad ones. It is very difficult for a studio to retain its identity in these cases.

The implosion makes complete sense from all angles. EA had a death grip on Bioware since they were acquired. They ended up making some weird games that're nowhere in Bioware's wheelhouse. Remember Anthem?

What really killed Bioware was the downfall of the only thing they were really good at: writing. You know if even Angry Joe is mad at your narrative, then you really messed up. It is my hope that the writers who worked on Veilguard learn from their stupid blunders, but somehow, I have a feeling they might actually double-down. There's been a massive saturation of soft yet preachy games in the same manner that there's been a saturation of such shows/movies. Tough topics are avoided or tipsied around while a certain message is front and center as if you're at a rally. Cringe like that takes one out of the narrative completely. When writing is sacrificed for that, a good game it does not make.

We'll always have good memories of Bioware. I just hope that they quietly go the way of Westwood so they stop living long enough to become villains.

It does, and I would broaden your point a step further. Offhand, I cannot think of a single company that went public, as in "is on the stock market", that resulted down the line in a better experience for the consumer. If there is an example where the consumer wins out over the profit-seeking, it's surely an unintended anomaly. The consumer experience is always worse by my view, because the interests of the consumer are diametrically opposed to the interests of shareholders. So, it is indeed corporate greed; despicably entrenched corporate greed.

As a contrast, a hypothetical indie company who gets bigger to the point of being able to acquire other companies, might not necessarily have a decline in product quality, so long as they stay private. Though, I would still say having individual and smaller scale companies is superior.

With the games themselves, others opinions may vary, but imo it is no coincidence that I find the best titles that devs make while under corporate umbrellas tend to be the first ones. Bioware is a great example; Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age Origins are the best in their series. Not to say I wouldn't like the sequels to come to GOG, same for Dead Space (could skip Dead Space 3, no need to tempt GOG's Galaxy-pushing corporate tendencies with that one), but fans who share my ranking will always wonder "what could have been" in terms of keeping true to RPG mechanics and depth.

Normie audience, oh please..... You are talking about yourself here, you do realize this? You give absolutely no input what so ever, i'm trying to keep a sane conversation here, you do realize this, yea?

That said, what really stood out for me is the game's optimization, at least from a 3090Ti perspective ;p

there are not a lot of recent games out there that provide 75+ fps for less than 200 Watts, another noteworthy candidate in this segment is of course Doom but, let's wait for the slayer himself to speak with their upcoming grand release

Pardon my transgression. I'll humbly bow out of your "sane" conversation and no longer taint it with my "non-input" :)

Nice, thanks for the read, the link to the article, though if i read through the lines it all comes down to a lot of bullshit. We were coming back from a negative experience blablabla ... like where's your senior young one ;-)

It also reminds of that Discworld novel that describes live in show bizz
or your regular food for thought what you get when creative minds work together...

I don't buy it. EA screaming failure seems more as a cheap attempt at keeping your workforce at bay, your investors reasonable happy and the public confident (though don't get me wrong here, i'm nowhere a 6 number salary)
oooh booo, you started the normies talk... be a man and swallow ;p

Of course DA2 was a negative experience at that BioWare studio. After having 6-7 or so years to work on DA: Origins which became a masterpiece, EA gave them like 12-14 months IIRC to probably crunch and bank out DA2 to try and capitalize on the success of DAO base-game, Awakening expansion, and its DLC's. That's not much time on a CRPG to work on it even back then - esp. when compared to the masterpieces of DA: Origins.

For the player: DA2 is also much shorter than DAO too. DA2 is like 40-60 hours approx. and give or taken, when including DLC's - DAO could go 50-100+ hours and more if you include expansions and DLC's.

They (BioWare) also had to simplify things (i.e. make the game more action-y for the gamepad-crowd on consoles and less CRPG/strategic) and recycle environments, too. And they set the game in mostly one city (Kirkwall) b/c of this fast turn-over EA wanted too. Remember, reviews were good on DAO for consoles, often not fond of the combat for its gamepad - but loved the PC version shined b/c strategic-CRPG's of that sort play best w/ a keyboard-mouse combo in the RTwP (Real-Time with Pause) style of gameplay.

It's also a game they (BioWare) didn't even want to call DA2, but was originally supposed to be called DA: Exodus. They (BioWare) wanted it to be seen as a side-game or stand-alone expansion, not a sequel. Given that name, also makes me wonder if the Ex-BioWare staff that went to ArchType Studios to make sci-fi game Mass Effect-like upcoming spiritual successor Exodus picked that name symbolically and purposely.

And we never got DA2: Exalted March expansion - and a lot of fans of DAO did not care for DA2, so that all didn't help either.

Just like I'm sure it didn't help that EA mettle-d and cancelled DA4: Joplin version in 2019. In a best case scenario, EA should've let BioWare cook and finish Joplin...and then we probably still would've got VeilGuard (Morrison version of DA4), but much later.

EDIT:

Mark Darrah's Tweets on some of this stuff:
-> https://x.com/biomarkdarrah/status/1470185242275180544?s=21
-> https://x.com/biomarkdarrah/status/1470185245039153157?s=21

David Gaider on some info on DA2: Exalted March - https://the-gaider-archives.tumblr.com/post/110339259933/could-i-ask-about-what-was-switched-over-from-the

EDIT 2:
Also, if we're talking about DA: Inquisition (Dragon Age 3) - they (BioWare) had a lot of trouble adjusting their usual RPG stuff into Frostbite (an engine built for really Battlefield-like FPS's and didn't have a RPG-like save system) and they supposedly crunched like crazy.

More links on DA: Inquisition development stuff:
-> https://gamerant.com/dragon-age-mark-darrah-bioware-problems/
-> https://kotaku.com/bioware-magic-is-bullshit-says-former-dragon-age-pro-1848385237

I'm not trying to downplay this in any way, i'm guessing someone up high thought that it would be very possible to do with some minor updates to the system in place, and i'm also guessing someone in Bioware agreed

We never know i guess, i'm sure ME2 & 3 were pretty nice to play as multiplayer shoot outs i only enjoyed single player. I did gave Anthem a try and it was a nice to get a hand at some multiplayer dungeons next to enjoying the story single player but yea, with Destiny out there and of course the others, i guess EA would have had a better shot with releasing a grand mp title by themselves, more or less supported by Bioware.

Again from earlier in this discussion, you really need a relentless marketing personality and have a good grip of the reality of the market to make such a thing work... I mean i guess CDPR would have better luck with a Cyberpunk MMO shooter after their second title if they manage to enthral the world again but then your talking about tens of millions of players that really enjoy what you are doing against the millions from Bioware

I appreciate EA in a odd sense, even when their financial empire is based on money scheming children they are not afraid to stick their head out

While the ME3 Multiplayer was fine and addictive & all - in some ways, I'm glad it's gone from ME3 game as the way to grind-up your Military Rating for the single-player campaign portion of the game. If you ain't into this stuff - yeah, it's repetitive and grind-y to do that. Glad they retooled that in Old ME Trilogy's final patch and ME Legendary out-the-box.

I did have fun w/ it - but, I wish it also worked offline and I could have bots for AI enemies and AI teammates. It just is sad that dev's put work, sweat, tears, resources, and $ into these skirmish modes...and often these are multiplayer-only. MP doesn't last forever, in many cases. And when the user count dies - well, it's done b/c it's central-server based. I do miss the old days of LAN/TCP-IP support and P2P when gamers connected to each other and/or bought their own dedicated-servers to keep Multiplayer portions of game's going, since companies will pull the plug and then nobody can even check out the skirmish mode.

I honestly would rather more $ and content were built into the single-player stuff than companies tacking on a Multiplayer component as a small additional after-thought.

I still miss the days when games that had MP often had Toolkits and SDK's - and then gamers could go ahead and make their own maps, levels, mods, and other stuff. Think like the old HL days, Quake days, Unreal 1 MP, and UT days. It felt like there were endless supplies of this stuff, to keep us gamers going by the Community themselves - all before corporations took over and turned everything into official MTX's.

What is even "Woke" nowdays? BioWare is doing bad because of other reasons. They've always included characters from all spectrums, social, ethnicity, sexual, et cetera...

Veilguard in specific, is due to low-risk approach to decisions and storyline paths of the game - non-existant - no use of DA Keep and narrowed-down style to simplicity. There's more nuances on that.

Grown ass gamers complaining about "Woke" is just pathetic