Exclusives are a way of creating competition between storefronts. Epic has drawn a line in the sand labeled 12% and now expects Steam to step up if they want games to be drawn back to their storefront. 30% is an INSANE royalty rate and they only got away with it because there wasn’t an alternative. Now there is.

Ah, falling back on the “Trump means populism is bad myth,” as if Trump isn’t a product of the elite.

Yep. It’s like reading a beautiful description of a slow motion car crash. EA, please stop making statements about how you think your devs don’t deserve to be torn down and instead start LISTENING to them rather than knocking their legs out from under them.  Everyone sees what is going on except you guys.

It’s another great breakdown by Schreier. But I wish he would explain all the indecision from the leadership team. It seemed like a lot of progress was made in the last 16 months when Mark Darrah joined the team and started making decisions. Why didn’t Game Director Jon Warner make decisions the five years prior to…

The most cringey part was reading about interacting with the Frostbite support team.

This article certainly shows that management in Bioware shared in some of the fault, but EA is constantly hanging over everything going on, especially with the mandated use of Frostbite, which is clearly not designed primarily for these sorts of games, and thereby introduces a number of significant hurdles.

It’s possible that given another year Bioware would have come out with something amazing, but I didn’t get that the problem with development was primarily a lack of time (they had seven years, after all). It seemed like the problem was a lack of direction within teams, a lack of leadership from above, and the fact…

Yeah EA was at fault for Frostbite, which granted is a big hurdle but Bioware had. Seven. Years. and barely had a outline of a game. Sorry but at some point, that’s on bioware. More time for them to hem haw around without deciding on anything wasnt going to all of a sudden change and turn things around.

Well ok or highly affordable with good discounts for various groups.

No, I agree that leadership was a huge problem, but I think that’s something that gets sorted out with time. And aside from whatever you thought about Andromeda, it seems pretty clear that a large issue for both games was shoe-horning Frostbite in, and then throwing the game out before it was ready. Were EA not in the…

It’s largely EA’s responsibility to ensure that those leadership roles are filled. EA, as the owner of BioWare, is responsible for the management of BioWare. A good manager will notice when its charges are floundering and provide the resources needed. EA did not do this to a sufficient degree. 

Amtrak’s a weird government corporation, but no the US is pretty good at keeping it public.

No human lives like a human being if their food options can be summed up as “Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, or Olive Garden.”

You’re right.

No one cares about the suburbs.

After reading through it twice now and sitting on it a while to sum up Edmonton made all the same mistakes that both Austin made with SWTOR years ago and Montreal made more recently with Andromeda, refused to take any of the advice from those studios as they were “beneath us” (when those previous two games suffered…

Anthem could have survived being directionless or frostbyte, or the ego, but only one of them.

Great article, thanks for putting this all together, and big respect to the current and previous Bioware devs that spoke to you for this. The industry in general is sort of a mess, and the Bioware studios seem to have their own specific issues too, and they’re never going to get solved by pretending everything is fine.

Nice job as always, Jason; thanks for confirming a lot of what we all feared. A game that was rushed out and built with a toolset that at the very least wasn’t an ideal fit. And not learning from Destiny’s missteps because they couldn’t talk about Destiny is pretty galling.