No other studio ever matched BioWare's 15 year run of excellence. But all too many share the story of the last ten years – talented teams undermined by weak, trend-chasing mismanagement

After the past five years of seemingly endless closures, cancellations, and restructures, after the tens of thousands of layoffs that the industry has endured like a relentless drumbeat, you'd think that we'd all have grown some pretty thick skin. How much can one more bad news story really hurt?

It's not the sting of surprise, to be clear. The speed with which the newly private-equity-owned Electronic Arts moved to shutter the studio was unexpected, but the outcome was grimly predictable. The foundational logic of a private equity buyout is that some finance types have looked at a business and concluded that they can load it up with debt which it'll pay back by slashing costs. BioWare was never likely to survive that process intact, if at all.

It's not even, if we're being honest, a sting of injustice, per se. The cutting of so many jobs at a studio ( among a total of 400 being slashed across EA ) alongside the cancellation of the project it was working on will never feel fair or right, especially when the decisions that led to it were so entirely out of the control of the talented people who now find themselves facing unemployment. But in a broader view, if the knife had to fall somewhere (which it did not), you can see why it fell here.

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