this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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EA’s BioWare will lay off 50 and cut ties with unionized Keywords playtesting group (venturebeat.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How else are you meant to interpret this other than it being a bad sign for the studio? Laying off staff in the “home stretch” of a project? I’m sure getting an end game credit will be sufficient consolation for getting ditched at the last stages of a multi year development.

Also no leadership changes either? Not even after andromeda? Sure it’ll be super humbling to sack workers for what seem like incompetent leadership in BioWare since ME3.

Frankly I’m surprised it’s taken this long for BioWare to begin the traditional EA pipeline of being “taken out back” after being squeezed for every bit of profit.

[–] EnglishMobster 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

EA's been doing layoffs all year. They announced back in May that they're cutting 6% of all positions across the company. This is likely part of that, since the layoffs will continue through September.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Are we really pretending EA doesn't do this to every studio that shows a hint of profit decrease? It's been a major part of their business model for a decade or more.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

One of the people they fired was the woman who created Varric and who wrote the Chant of Light. That is a reeeeally bad sign.

[–] MotoAsh 8 points 1 year ago

Are you kidding, this day and age? Incompetent management fails upwards.

[–] vasametropolis 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

So they're on suicide watch after Baldur's Gate 3? Got it.

What's the point of a union if you just get dropped anyway? The industry is an embarrassment.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

EA also has playtesters that they don't pay they just give you some games.

[–] dylanTheDeveloper 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean if its just playing it normally and not proper testing (run there and jump while spamming the inventory key until the game breaks kind of testing) then that's a pretty sweet deal

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As student with nothing better to do and in a time of better EA games yes, nowadays? I wouldn't recommend it. I heard people played deadspace 1 to the end and got like 8 games back in the day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Even playing it normally should earn you more. It's EA, they have a lot of money. And the most common bugs and ux problems can be noticed by playing a game normally. If Blizzard made Diablo 4 to be tested normally, most of the things people complained about wouldn't have been there from the start.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

There's anti-union busting laws that are supposed to disallow a company from blatantly targeting unionized employees. But they're worthless if not used to take the company to court. Starbucks has been up to the same thing: when a store unionizes they mysteriously select it to close.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

EA has not said when Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will ship.

Yeah, I won’t believe it’s actually shipping until I see it for sale on store shelves. I literally said, “Because it won’t” when I read that line.

At this point, if BioWare survives long enough to ship Dreadwolf, I’ll be surprised.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it'll ship, because EA has probably sunk a lot into it already. But there will also be a huge amount of pressure for it to make a shitload of money so it'll most likely release half-finished and loaded with microtransaction nonsense.

Then there will most likely be a backlash like there was with Anthem and possibly Bioware will limp along for a bit, maybe become a support studio for someone else for a while, but I don't really see them making another big game after this, at least in their current form.

There was talk of a new Mass Effect game IIRC but that could really be made by any of EA's studios, it's not like anyone who made the originals special will still be at Bioware anyway.

[–] EnglishMobster 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

EA is not a believer in the sunk cost fallacy.

I'm a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).

They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.

This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There's an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn't like movie tie-ins one day.

There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.

Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Man, Black Flag would have been even better as a Pirates of the Caribbean game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Black Flag without the real-world stuff would have been great. I need to see if there's a good pirate game out there. I played Sid Meir's Pirates! or whatever it was called, but a 3D pirate game like Sea of Thieves, but single player.. hmm.