It’s been longer than I would’ve liked, but it’s finally time for another wonderful installment of The Riot Retort!
In case you missed the news last week, EA shut the doors on BioWare and laid off roughly 400 employees across the company, including approximately 50 at the studio. Naturally, this is a great tragedy within the games industry, where certain people believe that studios should be able to coast by on the name of the studio itself.
Yes, work by a completely different set of people did 20 years ago should influence how the company of today is treated.
BioWare may have released three commercial disappointments in a row, but dammit, THEY made Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins.
I could keep going, but this is supposed to be a retort, and that means tearing apart someone’s work in line-by-line fashion.
And so we find today’s target, one Austin Manchester, writing for… Polygon, of course. At least it’s not Kotaku this time.
Our subject is his editorial, BioWare Deserved Better.
Let us begin.
The writing may have been on the wall, but that didn’t make the news any easier to stomach.
Well, that depends, my friend. You see, in business, when something isn’t working, it’s usually best to abort it rather than continue to flush money down the drain.
So while people losing jobs may be unfortunate, it isn’t hard at all to stomach when you consider that when people make shit products that few people spend money on multiple times in a row, perhaps giving them more time and money to make another disaster isn’t the smartest business sense.
So vomit, commit verbal diarrhea, do whatever you have to do, my friend, for we’re going to break this down and properly digest this bit of news so that you can properly stomach it.
It’s an unceremonious end to a studio that was once at the forefront of choice-based, narrative-focused RPGs. The hundreds of employees who worked on its games over the years brought whole galaxies to life, filling them with beloved characters.
Yes, of course, but, my friend, we should remember that BioWare is just the name of a company, and the vast majority of the people who brought those galaxies to life weren’t working there anymore.
Most importantly, BioWare series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age created spaces for players to feel represented and included.
Ah, my dude… I figured this was coming, but not even through the second paragraph means you were speed-running this.
Why is it that every single time we have to do one of these, it boils down to “muh representation”?
Normal people can play a game and bang the hell out of an alien chick, or dude, and not once think they’re being represented or included.
I enjoyed Mass Effect. At no point did I think I was Commander Shepard. I even played as FemShep, and not for LGBTQ reasons, but because if given the chance when playing a third-person game, I’m going to choose to stare at the female’s ass and not the dude’s.
But then I don’t insert myself into the game and think I actually am Shepard.
It’s not a stretch to say these games changed, or even saved, lives. BioWare’s games are art, and the power that art can have on an individual cannot be quantified.
Well, hand me a tissue.
I’m all for whatever helps someone going through a difficult time for whatever reason, so hey, if someone doesn’t “unalive” himself or herself because a video game got them writing fanfic and making friends, more power to that person. That’s great.
But “BioWare’s games are art” is kind of a nonsensical, say-nothing statement. All games are art. All art isn’t good. Just because someone is painting under the Picasso signature doesn’t make them THE Pablo.
BioWare’s games used to be good. Then they weren’t, for reasons all sane people can properly deduce.
Of course, studios aren’t monoliths; dozens or hundreds of talented people are behind any name on the door. Some of the people you’re familiar with had already left BioWare to work on other projects, like Casey Hudson and his new studio’s upcoming Star Wars game.
Two points for fucking Gryffindor for acknowledging a truth and not burying his head in the sand screaming about muh precious BioWare.
The vast majority of old BioWare were long out the door. Some made great games that people wanted to play; modern-day BioWare made ugly messes that cared more about pushing an agenda than anything else.
The video game industry has been hit hard by mass layoffs over the past four years — which BioWare itself was subject to in 2025 — and, as the number of available jobs for both veteran and up-and-coming developers shrinks, this closure could end up sending many developers into other careers.
And good-fucking riddance. Many of them need to find other careers. Certainly the narrative team. Whoever decided to make Veilguard look the way it did. Whoever was responsible for animating the faces of those hideous creatures called people in Andromeda.
It should be somewhat concerning to people who actually care about the industry that, as development studios ballooned in size and budgets went through the roof, games started taking longer to make without necessarily getting any better. Not everyone in game development is there because they know what they’re doing or because they’re good at their jobs. None of these people are entitled to work as developers.
There’s nothing wrong with finding another career, one more appropriate for whatever skill set they have.
The loss of a studio, its history, the jobs it provided, and the art it could have made is always something of a tragedy.
Well, let’s not get carried away. The art it could have made could have continued to suck and not sell.
Others, like myself, would say that the real tragedy is continuing to celebrate a studio that is a shell of its former self simply because we enjoyed the work produced under the logo 20 years ago.
There’s no great tragedy in the closure of a studio that had become a joke and spent years failing to meet commercial expectations. It’s just reality.
For so many of us, the loss of BioWare hurts more than most losses because of how forward-thinking its games were and how beloved they’ve become by fans, who could find themselves represented and included in the studio’s body of work.
Yes, of course, and we all know that.
The irony is, of course, that it’s precisely this “forward-thinking” — which we all know is just a fancy way of saying progressive — posturing that I believe contributed to their games going the way they went. Which is to say, struggling to find an audience even when heavily discounted or given away.
As the saying goes, get woke, go broke.
Only time will tell just what ramifications the loss of BioWare has on the video game industry as a whole.
With any luck at all, it will be a wake-up call to the other established studios that have been looking to speed-run their own inevitable arrival in the dustbin of gaming history.
Quit making shit that doesn’t sell and alienating the people who were actually spending money instead of chasing a modern audience that only exists in your head. It’s not a hard concept to fucking grasp, my friend.
I just realized I’m already 1,200 words into this and not even a quarter of the way through our friend Austin’s editorial, so line-by-line might just keep us here all damn day. So we’ll pivot and take a pick-and-choose approach from here on out.
The Hits, and the Hate They Produced
In the eyes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age fans, BioWare peaked from 2007 to 2014.
In the eyes of anyone with a functioning set of eyes and a brain halfway capable of thinking.
It’s kind of wild to think about now — a time when a single AAA game may take five years or more to make — but BioWare released the original Mass Effect trilogy and three Dragon Age games in such a short amount of time.
Now, I’m no rocket scientist, though I have indeed stayed at a Holiday Inn, but that could be part of why BioWare no longer exists and why some other former heavy hitters will soon follow.
Imagine, you make six mostly good and well-received games in a seven-year span. Then you slow to one mess of a game that doesn’t sell well every five years. Clearly, Houston, we had a problem somewhere.
Maybe it was once that developers spent their days working on the game, trying to meet a deadline, and things slowed to a crawl once they perceived they had a whole damn decade to make the equivalent of a AA-level effort from 15 years ago. So they spent all their time in inclusion meetings, lecturing one another on the importance of Black-owned businesses, and jerking each other off.
But what the fuck do I know?
EA infamously gave BioWare barely any time at all to finish Dragon Age 2, which limited its scope.
Eh, they may have limited its scope, and yet they still managed to produce a critical and commercial hit. Maybe being on a tight leash isn’t such a bad thing when spending other people’s money.
Strict deadlines keep work progressing and discourage slacking off… breaking news at fucking eleven.
BioWare’s approach to storytelling was innovative, downright groundbreaking for the time, and the games gave each player real control over their respective stories.
I do believe, my friend, that we have found the magic words in this sentence: “For the time.”
And what a time it was. And yet we blinked, and so it went, and what came next was a complete disaster.
My Shepard’s path to saving the galaxy was different from yours, even if we both fell in love with the same Turian in Mass Effect 2 and 3.
Speak for yourself. I did no such thing. My Shepard was happily banging Miranda Lawson and her magnificent twins, back, of course, when BioWare would make an attractive female character and not produce an abomination to the eyes.
Combined, all those games sold millions of copies, and Dragon Age Inquisition even won Game of the Year honors at the 2014 The Game Awards (technically the first ever GOTY at The Game Awards).
And so it was the golden era. An era when, even if a game did have a progressive bent to it, it didn’t beat you over the head with it. Characters could be attractive. There could be a story worth telling. The game could both look great and play great. And they sold millions. Imagine that.
And then came the dark days, and behold, BioWare was no longer BioWare.
However, the early 2010s wasn’t the rosiest time for BioWare, as attacks came from outside.
I absolutely love how progressives can go from straight-up socialists screaming “Down with the corporations!” to absolutely defending them.
Don’t you dare attack my beloved company! They are shitting gold. Just look at them, they squat and produce.
So what if they’re heavily constipated and it’s taken five years to produce a nugget of fool’s gold? You’d have to be a fool to notice.
You can’t talk about Mass Effect without mentioning the highly derided ending of Mass Effect 3.
You can, but you chose not to. Why? Because it sucked and you know it.
And here’s the thing we don’t want to get lost in the sauce of this cooking, as the kids say: if Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 had been the quality of Andromeda or The Veilguard, no one would have given the slightest fuck how Mass Effect 3 ended because there would not have even been a third one.
Just as there will never be a Veilguard 2.
And look here, it is not lost on me that right after saying I was going to have to start picking and choosing what to respond to, lest we be here all damn day, I have continued to go line-by-line. I am addicted and thoroughly invested at this point.
Austin Manchester, you mad lad, look at what you’ve done to me. Where’s my pity party?
“You did this to yourself!”
Ah, so I did. Touché, my friend.
It’s hard to overstate what a watershed moment this was: Gaming fans, were they loud enough, could quite literally change a video game to their collective whims. (The first iteration of Gamergate started just two years later, in 2014.)
Oh, we are making progress now. I managed to skip a whole sentence. My own speed-run portion has begun. Time to make like Sonic and fly through this bitch, or rather run really fast.
I find it ironic that we are supposed to be discussing how a studio deserved better while acknowledging that one of its biggest commercial successes had an ending so terrible that they had to change the damn thing to combat the backlash.
Then they couldn’t produce a game that sold well enough to save their lives — literally, in the case of the studio — and here we are.
Mourning what? Deserving of what, exactly? A pat on the back? A participation trophy? A check for $1 billion to spend eight years making a game that doesn’t make back $5 million?
And speaking of Sonic, I have to ask: Is Sega still around?
Of course they are!
Why? Because when they started bleeding money, they fucking pivoted. Imagine that, someone who knows how to keep a business going.
They didn’t just sit there at their desks for 12 years trying to shove a four-inch square into a two-inch circle and debating why the fuck it wasn’t working.
A Decade of Misfires
Dragon Age: Inquisition was BioWare’s last critical and commercial success. It came out in 2014.
Let me count on my fingers here. One, two, three… that’s 12 years!
Isn’t that what I just fucking said?
Its (Mass Effect: Andromeda) characters also failed to resonate with audiences in the ways that Normandy’s crew did.
That’s a polite-ass way of saying they sucked. But fear not, my friend, I’ll say it the right way.
They looked like ass, had the personality of a rock, and were intertwined in a boring-ass story that even a five-year-old with a box of crayons could’ve written better.
Why is this hypothetical child writing with crayons instead of coloring with them?
Because Video Store Nightmares is an adult coloring book, and you can get your copy on Amazon right now.
Anthem was BioWare’s next failure.
I don’t even have to write about this one. I reviewed Anthem right here.
It took the Destiny approach of having a non-existent story but failed to deliver any of the fun or the looting. A questionable design choice for a looter shooter.
But then questionable design choices might as well have been BioWare’s motto for the last decade-plus.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It overcame yet another cycle of development hell to emerge as an actually good game, one that was received well by critics and players. However, it fell short of EA’s sales expectations, and was largely snubbed at that year’s Game Awards. Maybe a sequel to a 10-year-old game was never going to meet anyone’s sales expectations.
Yes, yes, I cheated. This is multiple lines. It’s my column, and I’ll run it how I want.
By the time Veilguard released, my friend, saying that a game was well received by critics meant precisely piss to gamers.
Oh yes, IGN and Polygon love it… thank you for confirming that it has to be trash.
And which players, my friend? Are we taking a page out of my playbook and picking and choosing which players we’re talking about when saying players received it well?
Had it been so well received by players, word of mouth might have been better and it might have sold more. Probably not, but we’ll never know.
I should’ve just done this line-by-line. There’s so much to pick at.
Austin, my good pal, this game wasn’t snubbed. It was deliberately excluded, as it should’ve been. Hogwarts Legacy was snubbed, too, and I suspect that had more to do with the gaming press not liking the author of the source material than the quality of the game itself.
And it’s not that people didn’t care about a sequel to a 10-year-old game. It’s that they have eyes and can fucking see that it was shit and didn’t resemble Dragon Age at all.
Don’t piss over the fence and tell me it’s raining, my Internet neighbor.
BioWare’s Fans Deserved Better Too
Because of the lack of a bona fide hit, worry over BioWare’s future festered after it was first announced that private investors, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, would be purchasing EA last year. Analysts warned EA might look to sell off its studios that don’t print money for it in the ways that its sports franchises do, and, despite BioWare’s storied history, its past decade was marred by underperformance.
Generally speaking, my business-illiterate friend, when new owners take over, they’re not going to be sentimental about numbers from 20 years ago when the past decade is staring them in the face.
You don’t have to be Warren fucking Buffett to see that BioWare was so far removed from printing money that it was practically pissing it right down the toilet.
Maybe Mass Effect 5 could have been the hit that BioWare needed, but the Bloomberg report that broke the studio closure news said the next sci-fi RPG was still in “early” development despite having been announced in 2020.
Well, you don’t need to be a business savant to understand why a game announced six fucking years ago that was still only in early development would raise some serious questions about how much money was being burned with so little to show for it.
Two decades ago, they would’ve produced six games during that time period, people would’ve loved them, and they would’ve made a shitload of money.
Tell me again why this studio deserved anything other than being closed.
That they made it this long is the mystery that not even Scooby and the gang could solve.
Developers who worked on Mass Effect 5 have since spoken glowingly of it and about how ambitious it was.
Of course it was.
Every fucking game that gets canceled was secretly the best thing that ever existed.
We poured our heart and soul into this game. It was on track to be the game of the century.
What? It was just in early development?
Ah, but dammit, it sounded good in our heads.
Yes, of course we thought Andromeda was great. And we thought Anthem was the Destiny killer. And no doubt, The Veilguard was a return to form.
We are fucking excellent. EA had no right to terminate us.
A leaked trailer of Mass Effect 5, called Mass Effect Universe, makes it look like an exciting spy thriller. James Bond in space? Who wouldn’t sign up for that? (Private Equity-owned EA, apparently.)
Ah, the good old leaked trailer. No trailer has ever been deceptive.
We had a game in early development, but look at this pre-production trailer we pulled out of our ass… see, it was going to be epic.
We had six years to work on this game, and we spent five of them brainstorming this pre-production trailer to show you when we inevitably got shitcanned.
Look at what you’re fucking missing.
Players won’t get the chance to experience Mass Effect Universe for themselves. We’ll just have to watch the trailer on repeat.
Or just play Andromeda, Anthem, and The Veilguard and see what you would’ve really gotten.
More shit added to the pile.
Those players have certainly felt wounded by BioWare’s closure.
Plenty of players felt wounded by the betrayal of more than a decade of shit produced by BioWare, long before anyone started mourning the loss of a game based on a pre-production trailer.
BioWare’s games were often targeted for their progressive themes; you could have same-sex romances in the Mass Effect trilogy before real-world same-sex marriage was legalized across the United States in 2015. Saudi Arabia isn’t exactly the most progressive state, and fans wondered if what they loved about BioWare’s games — that progressiveness — would make it a target for closure once the sale went through.
And plenty of people couldn’t care less about gay romances in Mass Effect or Dragon Age. It’s the cringe dialogue, lack of attractive characters, terrible graphics, and mediocre gameplay that people like me take issue with.
The inclusivity through BioWare’s games endeared them to fans.
Am I fucking stupid?
Did this studio not struggle commercially and get shut down after more than a decade of declining fortunes, with its increasingly unrelenting push for the elusive “inclusivity” being, in my view, a big part of what pushed longtime gamers away?
Have I entered a Twilight Zone where up is down and down is up?
My friend, in large part, I believe it was that obsession with inclusivity that turned fans away. How do you not see that?
What the hell have I been arguing about for the past 3,500 words?
“This game gave so many people the feeling of being represented. I don’t think you can underestimate that,” Jennifer Hale told Polygon earlier this year. She voiced Mass Effect’s FemShep, and would have been down to return as the character in Mass Effect 5 if BioWare wanted to bring Shepard back. Now, the developers will never have that chance.
Oh, for the love of Coke Zero.
Those poor developers will never have the chance to potentially, possibly bring back FemShep, which the voice actress would have been down for.
Can’t blame her for being down for a payday, and I don’t mean the candy bar, though I could eat one right about now.
Think of the poor, starving developers and how they’ll never have the chance. The game was announced six fucking years ago, and as far as we know, there was never even a plan to bring her back. But dammit, now they’ll never have the chance.
This is a tragedy.
And I will be damned, would you look at that? That was actually the end of the column titled BioWare Deserved Better.
I thought we were just getting started, as I was still waiting to see what they deserved, and it just ended.
And on that note: “The developers will never have that chance.”
Well, my friend Austin, we’ve spent so much time together today that I think we’ve become good friends. So allow me to introduce myself.
I am not the Joker. I am Patriot, but I do have a question for you.
What does a studio get when it spends over a decade repeatedly mixing divisive ideology with cringe narrative, terrible graphics, and mediocre gameplay?
I’ll tell you what it gets…
It gets what it fucking deserves.
