It’s an objective truth that laying people off is always going to suck. I don’t know anyone who worked at BioWare, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have empathy for them and their families. The games industry continues to be a dumpster fire, even though it sometimes looks like it’s not (witness the hype around GTA VI), and I can kind of imagine what searching for a job in the field — even for experienced developers and artists — must be like. I work in a field targeted by AI, and I know that if I were to lose my job, I suspect I’d be hard pressed to quickly land another, if at all, so I get it.

I do have fond memories of BioWare from their beginnings. I loved Baldur’s Gate: The Original, and even though I never finished it, I started it numerous times and even re-bought it when it got enhanced and released on mobile platforms. I was a massive fan of Neverwinter Nights. I spent an enormous amount of time using the toolkit, and the original collector’s edition is still here in a place of honor on my shelf. I was one of the few folks out there who really liked Anthem, too, and was upset that it was treated so poorly by it’s own stewards.

It is an objective truth that EA destroyed BioWare’s legacy as succinctly as they destroyed the company itself. BioWare’s output suffered under the corporatocracy of EA. I don’t mourn the passing of a “registered trademark” because history shows that being owned by EA was constrictive for BioWare; they ended life essentially as “BioWare in name only”. Fans of the franchise could hope that the in-development Mass Effect would have been a “return to form” for those who love that series, but in the Star Citizen community we have a term for this wide-eyed and probably unrealistic belief that things will be all right in the end: copium. Nothing BioWare produced under EA could live up to the hero worship people performed before the BioWare name. Was this a mercy killing, then? For that, EA would have to have exhibited a single shred of decency in the past 40 years, which they have not. This was a cold business decision, the kind we expected when we heard they were being bought out by Saudi investment partners.

What do we as consumers get out of this deal? EA can now route BioWare’s payroll into more sure things. Apex Legends will live on. Of course the Battlefield series will continue to churn out incremental iterations of online multiplayer shooters whose Venn Diagram of features overlaps those of Apex Legends significantly enough to wonder if they’re just conjoined twins. We’ll also be getting more Star Wars Jedi games and an Iron Man game, because despite being oversaturated with Disney products, these franchises have built-in fans who will ensure that they sell quickly and sell well. EA had once been a place which curated a diverse catalog of titles across many genres, but over time they became the stereotype of a ruthless corporate machine, trimming what they called “fat”, but what we called “choice”, and leaving us with nothing but bland offerings.

We can certainly point to EA’s sale to Saudi investment houses as the immediate reason for these moves, but you could ask anyone and they’ll tell you that EA has sucked for years before their buyout. It appears that they are quickly moving to whittle their catalog down to nothing but cookie-cutter entries in slam-dunk franchises that no one inside EA has to put any thought into. These titles will continue to dominate charts and feature prominently at the top of our Steam homepages. They’ll appear in Super Bowl ads and have real-world product tie ins. We won’t be able to get away from the same intense marketing we expect from these franchises, while continuing to be some of the most rote, derivative, safe money-makers for an already obscenely wealthy company and their investors. Truly, the worst timeline.

Goodbye, BioWare. While you ended life a pale imitation of the Great House you once were, in hindsight, the writing was on the wall even before the ink dried on your bill-of-sale to EA. You are the green-space that is paved over for yet another parking lot. You are the community center demolished by an uncaring capitalist despite the efforts of scrappy young breakdancers. I wish your employees nothing but luck in these turbulent times, and I wish EA to get fucked in the most horrific ways possible, because they are quite literally why we can’t have nice things.