Look, I am by no means an anti-capitalist. I barely have a shred of screaming pinko in me. I believe in competition and the markets more than centralised control, or any of that other stuff that leads to breadlines and misery.
But it is time to admit that big corporates have completely fucked up gaming and everything they touch to do with gaming. Completely.
Harken back to the days of the Commodore Amiga or Atari ST. We had an entire drawer of happiness, stuffed full of 3.5” floppy-dwelling entertainment. Life was good.
Studio names would flash up on our screens when loading that heralded a guarantee of a good time.
If you ever looked deeper into it, behind the logo to see what the studio actually was, it was 9/10 times a couple of full on ‘spergy guys sitting in their garage, slinging code for 16 hours a day and absolutely loving life, and earning enough money to buy all the Funko Pops they could ever need.
Now fast forward to today. They toil under the yoke of corporate misery, either for EA or Activision, it seems, striving for impossible deadlines because somebody in marketing who can’t tell her HTML from her C++ has already been on stage at E3 making promises.
Then, just before their nervous breakdown, they get shit-canned because it seems not only can these big corporates make a decent game on time, they also can’t run a goddamn company and need to restructure every 15 minutes.
Bring back ‘spergs in garages, I say!
Anyway, this is a very long introduction to the news that yet more fuckery is afoot in the world of the corporations who now run gaming.
According to a report at Bloomberg, Electronic Arts Inc. has announced it will lay off staff and shut down BioWare.
BioWare has been around for a long time, and was behind lauded games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
EA COO David Tinson and CSO Cam Weber also confirmed that the in-flight project to create a new Mass Effect game has been scrapped.
EA was the subject of a leveraged buyout by the Saudi Arabian investment fund and has big debts to pay down.
Another studio shuttered by the big umbrella corp.
