The Edmonton-based video game company BioWare is being shut down

Edmonton-based gaming company BioWare is shutting its doors for good. Now, this morning, parent company Electronic Arts said that it's restructuring its studio business, resulting in layoffs of about 3% of the company's workforce. It's a pretty sad day. I mean, 30-plus years ago, we built something I think was pretty awesome. And it's kind of sad to see the end of the dream. We went from a bunch of clueless kids just trying to make a game for the hell of it to literally being the best in the world at what we did. Here we make the number one rated game in all of the world, almost, here in Edmonton. And we grew the studio, like, in the time I was there, it went from six people to 420. And it was just a massive growth. It was, honestly, it was an amazing experience. Why did you choose to leave the company when Electronic Arts actually purchased BioWare in 2017, or 2007, rather? Yeah, so I lasted two years under EA. and I could just see that I could not succeed in that environment. BioWare was an innovation company. Electronic Arts was a monetization company. EA didn't have the patience to invest in longer burn creative product. And as a result, they were going to kill anything that was going to take too long. And good games, they take a long time. Do you think we'll see another company like BioWare in Edmonton again? And do you think they'll have that opportunity to keep it here? There was a lot of things that happened to line up to allow BioWare to succeed. One of them was a really low-cost currency. Another one was Edmonton was in a bit of a downturn. It was actually a fairly inexpensive place to live. There was a ton of engineering talent available. There was a lot of things that lined up in the right way at the right moment. And I don't know if we'll see that again. It's really challenging. And I mean, the trend in the gaming industry right now is offshoring. A lot of development work is going to Eastern Europe. A lot of development work is going to Asia. I mean, beyond the gaming industry, this is a common story. Canadian company grows, becomes world-class, somehow fails, and is wrapped up by some other entity. And I think it's a story we need to change, and I think we need to radically rethink how we look at investment in companies here and how we look at keeping companies here. I know there's got to be a lot of people who are really excited to do something amazing, again with with the next Mass Effect and now they're just not going to get that opportunity. That was a pretty magical place to be.