They’ve been trying to “Central Engineering” things.
I worked as a massive chip company, they thought they could fix things by moving a lot of engineering out of the groups and into a single place where different groups and products could borrow and plug and play tech from.
Which was a great idea, except the groups didn’t really understand what they wanted, and central engineering just wanted to make what they thought people wanted, which often fit nobody but looked really cool.
Bioware looks like they’ve been trying to pull all the game engine stuff central, which would be fine but the frostbite engine didn’t work for half of what they wanted, and more importantly the “divisions” ended up just being pushed to make “something” to show off their best new tech, even if there was 0 story or creativity behind it (I’m looking at you Anthem).
These careers are everything to them, they will gladly fuck whoever they need to to survive, but if you make them more afraid of the community then they’ll actually try to listen.
There was a brief period back in the late 2000s/early 2010s when Google listened to people.
That died by the time I joined, but I worked with people from before and they clearly didn’t give a shit about the customers anymore, it was all internal politics for promotions, you’d never get in trouble for pissing off customers.
Make them afraid of you, make them fear doing anything to piss you off, otherwise they’ll sell you out for their bosses and shareholders every time.
Because I’ve worked with the marketing assholes who lead to these decisions, and if you don’t get why they make them and how to get them fired for those decisions, you’ll never change anything.
That’s the difference between being a child, and being effective.