I'm really just sick of this shit.
EA, never a bastion of artistic integrity, to be fair, was bought out and on the chopping block is the stories Bioware studio, which gave us the first two Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect games.
Notably in that latter case, the studio had quite famously been working on a fifth game in the Mass Effect series, one that intended to return to the Milky Way and pick up the story of Commander Shepherd, somehow... a task I don't really know how they were going do given that I think most of the endings you might get with the third Mass Effect game leave Shepherd decidedly not alive anymore (or at least not alive in the same way).
But evidently, there was some kind of a plan. And while I'm certain there would have been a whole online discourse with a lot of really bad takes (and probably also some well-thought out criticisms) over the manner in which they cracked and stuffed the Mass Effect story into a shape that allowed it to continue on, I think we need to reckon instead with a broader issue.
Whatever flaws the studio's games might have, what made Bioware beloved was its ability to put really narrative- and character-focused games out there. I never played the Dragon Age games (maybe the first like hour of Origins) but I'm given that people have very similar feelings about it to Mass Effect. And in Mass Effect, the characters are so compelling that you feel like you know people like Garrus Vakarian or Tali Zora vas'Normandy. The stakes of the series were apocalyptic, but all the while, the threads that held it all together were the relationships you could build between Shepherd and his crew of heroes.
But there we go: money people decided they wanted a big company in an industry that is supposedly more profitable than Hollywood (though while I might have said ten or fifteen years ago that was because of explosive growth and popularity, now I feel like it's because Hollywood has been contracting faster than gaming).
Indeed, Hollywood just saw the parent company of one of its oldest, classic studios gobble up another of its oldest, classic studios, with a strong implication that a lot of things people love will stop being made in the interest of cost-saving corporate consolidation. Here, we're seeing the same sort of move - EA has announced that they'll be focusing instead on annual sports releases, you know, those games that are basically the same thing every year but with updated rosters of real-world players.
The defense that people have of the capitalist system is that it enables people to build the businesses they want to run and for customers to freely choose from a wide variety of goods and services. But we're really seeing in our modern day how that's just not true. Corporate consolidation robs us of the choices we might have had. Guys, I have zero interest whatsoever in buying FIFA 2027 so I can watch little digital guys on my screen play a sport that I don't watch when it's real human beings. If you like those games... fine, great. I love that they make them for you to play. But if a company that once represented a huge, broad array of video game genres is now narrowing its focus in the name of profitability, we're really losing out. And the system is not working the way that we were told it would.
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