Avi Lewis, head of the Canadian NDP party, has expressed support for employees laid off by EA last week, and spoke out about the perils of private equity.
Just about anyone who worked at Bioware during the golden era has long since moved on and gotten other work, so who would get the IP? Just a studio made up of whichever random people happened to be left when it shut down? If that’s the case, I don’t think that will accomplish anything because the last several Bioware games sucked and nobody liked them, which is a big part of why they’re being shut down in the first place.
If the goal is to get Mass Effect back on track, I think it’d be much more effective to sell the IP to a good studio that knows what to do with it, rather than just give it back to the existing devs so they can take 8 years to make a new game that has a good chance to bomb anyway.
And all that’s assuming that EA is even willing to part with the IP anyway. For all we know they might just want to sit on it forever/hand it off to one of their other internal studios, in which case that’s the end of that.
Also, which devs?
Just about anyone who worked at Bioware during the golden era has long since moved on and gotten other work, so who would get the IP? Just a studio made up of whichever random people happened to be left when it shut down? If that’s the case, I don’t think that will accomplish anything because the last several Bioware games sucked and nobody liked them, which is a big part of why they’re being shut down in the first place.
If the goal is to get Mass Effect back on track, I think it’d be much more effective to sell the IP to a good studio that knows what to do with it, rather than just give it back to the existing devs so they can take 8 years to make a new game that has a good chance to bomb anyway.
And all that’s assuming that EA is even willing to part with the IP anyway. For all we know they might just want to sit on it forever/hand it off to one of their other internal studios, in which case that’s the end of that.