Accurate. If Bioware gamers made a difference in EA pockets Bioware would still be open!

Is the definition of passion "subsidize money losing businesses"? Art can be done with passion because it's solo artists being paid by rich patrons. Studios require lots of people with salaries, this requires investment, investment requires returns. You can have games driven by passion, it's called indies and it thrives on Steam.

Tim Sweeney says sky blue, receives backlash from pro-steam bot accounts.

I appreciate Fran's POV here. I think many of us who spent the last 40 years playing games think of the industry as it was the 90s and early 2010s. That industry moved on, we didn't. The kids are playing Steal an Egg on Roblox. There are 935,000 concurrents on it at this moment. There have been 9.1bn plays since it launched in July. roblox.com/games/10777807077… The various Egg games on Roblox this year combined will have made more money than Veilguard in its lifetime. This is the kids' industry now, we are just old people nostalgic for the days of rock and roll.

"Why don't real journalists act like political hacks like us?"

This is correct. Gears of War being released on PS5 would not have sold enough copies to resolve the cost issue. The venn diagram of Gears of War fans who own a PS5 but do not own an Xbox or PC is a slim overlap. You can make an argument in expanding the fanbase for the longterm, but that is not a resolution for the lack of sales. At the end of the day, though, cost is the biggest issue. Cost does not work in the west anymore for most AAA products relative to their return. The audience willing to pay for games is too small relative to the expected expansion when many of these games were invested into 5+ years ago and when the teams were hired at the height of the ZIRP era. Meanwhile Roblox, China-made games, Tiktok and others have chipped away at game time spent and dollars spent. That doesn't mean that Xbox doesn't have a bright future, it just means that it needs to place smaller, more targeted bets, like its "burgers and fries" strategy for investing into the top franchises. I continue to believe that Minecraft is its biggest opportunity.

When publishers sell their studios back to management with the IP (Hitman, DoubleFine) it's typically because the publisher believes the IP to be worth less than the cost of closing the studio. I am confident EA's new owners see huge value in the IP, just not in the cost structure of the studio. Buying a Bioware (liabilities) as management without the IP (which EA would not sell) makes no sense. All you would get is the name and debt.

1. I am not suggesting Bioware died because of culture war issues. I do not know that this is the case. It is possible that their specific single player RPG products were not good enough. It is possible the market is too niche to sustain their product unless absolutely exceptional (see BG3.) Only one thing is clearly true: not enough copies sold to make the return on investment worth it for future titles. 2. Suggestions that the studio should have been sold implies there is a buyer. There is no buyer. Salaries are too high, games take too long. No one is buying big team studios that take years to make games anymore. The market for funding studios of that size DOES NOT EXIST. In many cases, especially in places like Canada with strict labor laws, it is cleaner to shut down a company than to attempt to restructure.

Every unreleased or cancelled game had the potential to be great.

On average there were 74 games released on Steam a day in 2025. With AI there could be 10x more, or 740 games released on Steam a day. On average there were 15,000 games released on Roblox a day in 2025. On average there are 20m youtube videos uploaded a day. Everyone still uses YouTube, creators make tons of money. Devs still building games and finding success on Roblox, new games popping off all the time. The answer to AI on Valve is better algorithms for discovery. As I said yesterday, Steam needs to become Roblox before Roblox can become Steam. Anything else is a dumb take.

I want to be clear I am not celebrating BioWare's death, I think it is unfortunate. My purpose has been to explain the business realities causing it, which is high costs combined with lack of sales.