A couple of weeks back, a consortium of new owners—including the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a private equity company, and Professional Son-In-Law Jared Kushner’s Affinity investment group—completed their leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts, one of the biggest video game companies on the planet. Given the state of both the private equity playbook and the video game industry as a whole these days, the only real surprise about what happened next might be that it took more than a month to roll out: Mass layoffs at several EA studios, including the full closure of BioWare, the famed studio behind hit role-playing game franchises like Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
The studio announced the closure on Twitter earlier today, where it was, shock of shocks, treated to the gleeful hooting and hollering of various GamerGate-brained forces crowing about the death of a studio that put genuine work into trying to meet its players—and, specifically, its LGBTQ+ players—where they lived. With games that often included romances between player characters and their NPC companions as a major selling point, BioWare spent years navigating what it’s like to invite players of all stripes to see themselves in the characters they controlled. The results weren’t uniformly artful, but they were always earnest: a genuine good-faith effort to expand the definition of how video game avatars present, act, and love.
BioWare has, undeniably, struggled in recent years, though, in part thanks to decisions imposed upon it from its now-former corporate overlords. The studio has never returned to the heights it hit between 2012 and 2014, for instance, when it rolled out the final installments in the first Mass Effect and Dragon Age trilogies; attempts to return to those universes in later years never attained the same acclaim, nor did the studio’s one major push to break into a new IP with Anthem, a multiplayer action game released in 2019, and which wound up embodying many of the worst aspects of the dawning era of our current games-as-service hell.
Per Kotaku, EA laid off roughly 400 people this week, representing roughly 3 percent of its workforce across multiple studiops. Gaming companies being how they are, they announced these job losses to staff in an email crowing about being “The number one publisher in Western HD gaming.”
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