It’s a bunch of bean counters seeing trends in the markets, seeing others cutting jobs and following suit.
Bull, bear markets, trends, the whole thing is fucked.
It’s spoken about like it’s some mythical, mysterious thing and the government can try to rein it in with their levers if they must as a last resort, because we mustn’t interfere with the markets unless the outlook is bleak.
Give me a fucking break. Is anyone buying this anymore?
The old rich fucks and their old rich fuck friends and their old rich fuck companies, investment firms, hedge funds, whatever else their wrinkly old hands can get on they will move in their directions as they choose.
They don’t lose at this game and they’re pulling away at an outrageous rate, they’re killing us and the planet while they’re at it. They don’t even have to. They don’t even fucking have to. The people who have the shortest time left here are trying to suck the most out of it before they leave and leave way less of it for the rest of us.
I don’t know when others will start getting mad, but it’ll probably be too late.
This is semi good news. While obviously it ain’t great that people lost their jobs, there’s a good change a few of them will be like “now that I have a few months of pay, how bout I try creating that cool idea I had a while ago?”
i wish i knew. i can tell you when i was laid off (in software), i was given an nda and non-disparagement contract that my severance was contingent upon so based on that experience, these companies consider severance a “gift”
edit: i think it also (duh) depends on the state - many states are “employment at will”, and i would guess in those states since they can dismiss you without cause (save for discrimination), you aren’t required to pay severance. most companies still do, but i imagine the requirement wouldn’t mesh with the concept of at will employment
Yeah. I'm sure laying off staff who have been crunching on Dreadwolf for who knows how long is really going to "unlock the creativity" of everyone left. At least some of the people laid off will be able to find work in other parts of the company. Honestly, if Dreadwolf and the new Mass Effect aren't successes then I feel like it will only be a matter of time until we hear about EA shutting the studio down. Hopefully, Dreadwolf is good and sells well, but the people working on it have to be under a lot of pressure between the layoffs, Biowares last two games failing, and BG3 setting a new standard for RPGs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Damn, even if it's coincidental like the article suggests; those two things happening at once is NOT a good look for Bioware. Especially with BG3 being such a huge success.
However, some slim silver lining for those being laid off is that EA/Bioware appear to be handling the situation more gracefully than others. From the article:
McKay said that EA chose to act now to provide impacted colleagues with as many internal opportunities as possible. These changes coincide with a significant number of roles that are currently open across EA’s other studios. Impacted employees will be provided with professional resources and assistance as they apply for these positions. Those departing will receive credit in the game.
I highlight the last part because removing people from credits is a shit thing to do and I'm glad to see them overtly state this will not be the case. Hopefully this is not just PR BS and the laid off employees get new roles quickly.
Not gonna lie. I read that as “in-game credits” and was curious why you were lauding EA for pulling something worse than company scrip.
The fact that this is notable tells a lot about the industry, and where major publishers can add low-stakes, low-cost value to their dev positions by just beating out others in the industry getting notoriety for being worse. It’s still good that they’re doing it, but it costs them 30 minutes of someone’s time to do something most publishers should be doing as a standard practice.
The previous two games, 20 years ago. It's what gave them the reputation of being a studio that made great RPGs. Then they went on to make Neverwinter Nights (another D&D game), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Star Wars with rules very close to D&D), Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.
BioWare made BG 1 & 2 back in the day, and they started Dragon Age as a spiritual successor to their DnD games as I would imagine (and assume) that EA didn’t want to deal with WoTC with getting the license to a DnD game.
So it’s kind of ironic that arguably one of the best games to come out this year is a Baldur’s Gate game as the new Dragon Age game sounds like it might be languishing in development.
Ubisoft is allowed to stream CoD? But Ubi doesn’t have a streaming service? Or is CoD allowed to be on Ubi+ which enables Ubi+ subscribers to play the games through GFN / Luna?
Ubisoft was a great Stadia supporter. I’m kinda hoping they will get hold of the Stadia tech somehow and start their own streaming service.
Ah exactly the type of game we’re all waiting for, now my data can partially live on another server somewhere else instead of just the dev’s servers, revolutionairy /s
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