Bye-Bye, Bioware

Yesterday news broke that Electronic Arts is shutting down Bioware.

First things first: If you came here wondering what this means for Star Wars: The Old Republic, the answer is: NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Bioware hasn't been working on SWTOR for almost three and a half years. (I've got to admit I was not prepared for the sheer number of SWTOR players posting on social media who apparently still don't know who actually makes their game.)

Back in June 2023, when it first leaked that SWTOR was about to be moved to Broadsword, we were all quite worried about what that was going to mean. Going from being developed by a well-known, prestigious studio to one that was virtually unknown could only be a bad thing, right? However, a few ex-Bioware devs quickly spoke up on social media to tell us that nonono, this is a good thing for SWTOR, trust us.

As it turns out, they were 100% correct, because while SWTOR is still around and doing pretty well, the well-known and prestigious studio is no more. Who would have thought that an MMO whose shutdown people have been predicting pretty much every year since its launch would outlive its beloved creators? It certainly feels ironic.

Found on /r/swtor_memes

A lot of people seem to blame the shutdown on the EA buyout that was announced about a year ago, but... while I'm not saying that had nothing to do with it, EA had a reputation for shutting down beloved game development studios long before that, and people had already been speculating that Bioware would be next on the chopping block for years. That link goes to a meme of EA as the Grim Reaper knocking on Bioware's door and was uploaded four years ago. I'm sure I've seen more and similar memes around too; this was just the first example I found via a quick Google search.

That doesn't mean that the closure doesn't suck, just that it's not surprising. I know people who loved Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but neither came close to being as successful as previous installments in their series, so it seemed like only a matter of time until EA decided that Bioware was no longer "good enough".

I'm not the best person to be writing a heartfelt eulogy for Bioware though, because I haven't actually played a lot of their creations. I loved the first two Dragon Age games, and the original Knights of the Old Republic held up well enough when I came to it very late via the mobile port. But once I started playing SWTOR... it kind of scratched that itch and I didn't feel the need to play other games of theirs, as bad as that may sound. And since they in turn didn't actually seem to have the same level of appreciation for SWTOR (by all accounts it was always treated as inferior to the single-player games based on their own IPs internally), it kinda made me like the studio less over time. Based on various exposés about their internal processes, it also sounds like they had a lot of dysfunctional development going on in there, and not all of it was EA's fault either.

I kind of hope that Jason Schreier writes a book unravelling the history of the studio at some point, just like he did with Play Nice for Blizzard. In the meantime, I hope the devs affected by the studio closure land on their feet and can find new ways to continue doing something they love. Maybe Broadsword could even hire a couple of them?