Not to defend anything, but the writing was on the wall long before Saudi Arabia got its grubby oily hands into it. People made games not logos and EA has treated them so spectacularly shit that they ensured that none of the people who made good games remained.
That could change. EA is barely 1 step away from being the gaming industry’s equivalent of a Private Equity firm itself. It’s less of a publisher and more of a vulture that runs promising companies into the ground for profit. The old crew is still around. I understand a lot work for Archetype Entertainment now under Wizards of the Coast. Would they be willing to come home under new management? It’s worth asking.
Why buy it back? Support them to create a new company. Don’t reward the shitty company owners by giving them millions after they fired everybody.
Intellectual Property.
Can’t copyright gameplay mechanics, and the plot is basically “get a team of misfits together to battle an incoming evil”, ie. it’s Seven Samurai IN SPAAAAACE. Plus, one of the big criticisms that I saw about ME:A is that it’s lazy; it’s the same old aliens as we’ve seen before even though that makes no sense in a new galaxy, and the plot is just trotting out some weary old tropes. Very risk averse, very insipid.
So yeah:
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could spend millions getting the IP off of the shitty owners, to make a very safe and boring addition of the ME games
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make a completely new game with similar mechanics, but take some risks with the story. A fun game with a stupid plot is still fun; a fun game with a great story is exceptional. So why not roll the dice? You can get the staff easily enough to form a new company.
In the end you’re buying an existing fanbase with the IP.
Otherwise you get a Frost Giant scenario with “Stormgate”.
I just replayed ME2 and this really hits home.
The ME setting is cool but has some elements I’ve outgrown, like sexy blue space vixens (both Asari and EDI)
Here’s to hoping they get the band back together and write some new material.
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A bit of stretch to call Avi Lewis a political leader. No one has yet elected him in any capacity.
That would be so awesome
So wait a minute,
Company gets bought off to private equity, strips the assets until bankrupsy. The government steps in and wants to support the employees to take the gutted business.
Im all for support of workers owned businesses.
But seems like the government isn’t dealing with the root cause here.
End result: Private equity made money. Good business was stripped out of assets. Tax payers to support rebuilding.
Just tax the private equity firms more.
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.
“Private equity” isn’t a monolithic structure that can be easily defined. It’s just private companies with an exotic corporate structure. You can’t really target them because you will target other private businesses in the process. What you can do is regulate their behavior so that a lot of their financial schemes are no longer profitable. Like, you shouldn’t be able to buy a hospital and then create a shell company to lease it back to itself while investors pocket the rent. PE finds creative ways to stiff banks and consumers with financial engineering and that’s what needs to be addressed.
Banning leveraged buyouts would be a good start.
The NDP aren’t the government and never have been.
Avi Lewis hasn’t even been elected to parliament.
I’ve got a whole lot of hate for private equity turning everything they touch into shit but this with EA, the closure was a decade in the making with how EA treated all of its acquisitions, drastically changing their culture, and forcing them produce quantity over quality.
Uhh the opposite actually. BioWare used to make a ton of games. For the last decade, they’ve made just a few games. They did better when they had a game out every 1-2 years rather than 4-5.
It’s both. EA was always a parasitic company, but PE accelerated the extraction of value by saddling it with an unsustainable amount of debt. It’s a zombie company now.
Yep. They’re just leveraging the newest boogyman for more bullshit. Same as it ever was.
And it’s not just EA; even the smaller shops are following suit.
TBF, an employee-owned rebirth might be the true path out of this. But the Federal support is going to need to be strong enough to either let them create an internal publisher or put in enough breaks that a publisher will be happy to take them on.
I think that even if they were to go independent, the magic and the IP are gone for Bioware at this point. A lot of the original veterans have all been laid off already by EA over the years, they’ve moved on, and while they could create spiritual successors to the IP, they’re locked away now and it really wouldn’t be the same if that’s what fans were looking for.
I think it would be more like a Turtle Rock Studio type of situation if they were to come back at this point.
the magic and the IP are gone for Bioware at this point.
aboslutely true, but there have been 58,000 game developer layoffs since 2022, with funding, and a willingness to relocate a few pieces of top talent from the US, I bet you could make one HELL of a studio.
One hell of a studio that wouldn’t be allowed to make ME or DA games. There are tons of those already. No IP means no BioWare.
Use the name to put a real team with bored industry experts back together. Start fresh or license it from EA. That’s free money to EA, they shitcanned the game expecting it to not bring anything in.
Oh my god Turtle Rock. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.
funny how Politicians know that Private Equity is bad in this case but the equivalent for Real Estate (REIT) is a sacred cow.
“Politicians” aren’t one hive mind. I assure you that this particular politician certainly does not see REITs as a sacred cow.
“Politicians” aren’t one hive mind.
YET. Vote Borg 2029!
Vote Borg 2029!
Assimilate the means of production? Central planning? From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs?
Got my vote.
Assimilate the means of production?
Yes
Central planning?
Yes
From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs?
No, everyone is expendable, and your needs are irrelevant.
No, everyone is expendable, and your needs are irrelevant.
Ah, so basically the best of both world between communism and capitalism. Sign me up.
Better than real life communists because those tend to just be a dictatorship of the vanguard. A true hive mind where not a single person can have a differing opinion would be the best solution to a lot of things.
I dunno, can we do those little parasite guys from TNG “Conspiracy” instead? At this point, I’m kinda willing to listen to their plan.
Honestly I’d take the BORG over this triple class system we’ve got now.
fair, one down, 3,749 to go
This is the NDP, our lefty party, it most definitely isn’t for them either.
