BioWare closure devastates gaming industry

BioWare has sort of always been there in the game industry, especially in Edmonton. It's sort of central to everything that we do here, and I never thought BioWare would ever truly shut down like this. That's a whole bunch of really wonderful game devs and craftspeople of all flavors who are now without a job. It's a pretty sad day. I mean, 30 plus years ago, we built something I think was pretty awesome, and it's kind 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. It was really bringing into the mainstream the potential for games to tell deep, complicated stories. It really kind of blew my mind that you could tell a story with a game that you could not tell any other way. Being FemShep means an enormous amount to me. The female character was equal to the male character. is an extraordinary privilege to be able to do that. I love me some kicking down barriers. 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. BioWare was bought by EA a while ago now. Yeah, so I lasted two years under EA. I could just see that I could not succeed in that environment. The priorities of BioWare in its beginnings were to make awesome games. that people would love to play and with incredible stories that were groundbreaking and once you join a corporation i believe that your priority becomes the bottom line because we live in an era right now of shareholder supremacy which essentially strangles out most other life forms 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 i know there's got to be a lot of people who who are really excited to do something amazing again with with the next mass effect that's why we're here and now they're just not going to get that opportunity mass effect isn't just a game it has a life of its own you know as long as there's a console we can play it on we can go there