Yesn't.

That may have been somewhat true in the past, but it is hard to articulate just how big of a hole they are in right now. The leveraged buyout has pushed EA's debt to over $20Billion USD.

They make that money back or they might not, but they are going to absolutely pillage and destroy the company in the process. The word that often follows "leveraged buyout" is "bankruptcy". It's a tale as old as corporate history.

Another Sims? Don't be daft. They'll release another Sims DLC and get all the money with much less effort.

Seriously, 4 has been a cash cow for over a decade now, with biannual expansion packs.

I bought battlefield 6 still enjoy it. And I bought the first year college football came back. But haven't bought one since. And have hardly touched it. Game was much harder than the old days

Like Martin Shkreli in that they'll increase the price of a life-saving drug 20x without consequences, or like Martin Shkreli in that they'll go to prison for defrauding rich investors?

Seriously fucked up that the second was considered a crime, but not the first, in Shkreli's case.

Games are essentially attack vectors with kernal level access to your computer.

Some games, with very specific anticheat. Let's not spread misinformation.

That being said, yeah I don't get it either - I refused to play Valorant for this reason.

I will never forgive EA for destroying Maxis.

The Sims.

You do not want to know how many 'dlc' there are for your digital dollhouse.

As well as entire community of enthusiastic corporate boot lickers with a 'cozy' aesthetic.

They're also in a lot of debt from making dog shit for the last 15 years.

Kind of yes, but actually no.

We just see that debt now, its explicit.

EA ... was subject to a leveraged buy out, that they sought out. They did this... because they needed cash, now.

What that means is that their internal financials were an absolute shit show... that they had, up untill that point, basically just legally lied about, hid, downplayed.

They fluffed up their balances and returns and cashflows in ways that are legal to do, but if you actually do due dilligence, you could read the writing on the wall.

Its basically the same as any other US company that got bought out / sold itself to private equity in the last 10 or 15 years.

Difference is, EA is so huge, it had to be bought out by essentially a sovereign wealth fund.

The funny thing is Mass Effect destroyed the series themselves with Andromeda. No Saudi help necessary.

ME manages to incorporate just about every SciFi trope in a good way, have punchy dialogue and characters, offer chills at some points, and have a great overarching plot. More importantly, they give it an ending.

BioWare really fucked themselves with that EA deal. I don’t see them saving themselves like Amplitude did. I suppose there’s DDO, it’s still around, love of D&D being what it is within D&D communities The devs made a deal with Warner Brothers and now it’s Standing Stone, but how often has that happened? Mostly, studios just die.

I grew up with a card catalog and had Netscape navigator at college right out of high school. Stellar graphics are great, preferred, but not necessary. Would I care if graphics/engine quality went back to Dragon age origins or II? Mass effect the original? Even FO:NV? No. But I want the story level, complexity, and total game time to be triple digits when being completionist about it. Witcher 3 is lovely but it’s the quality of darkness in it that makes it so compelling.

Even without the hardware limitations, good, immersive stories that keep you as involved as GoT before the writers stopped writing are already in short supply.

I’m presently replaying the Dishonored games. There’s only so much of that a person can do. Games worth the time sink are already in short supply.

Candy crush and similar bullshit can’t replace good games.

It's even better than that: it's buying the farm by indebting the farm itself to then butcher the cattle, sell all buildings, sell the lands and sell the tractors, keeping the money.

Private Equity keeps the money from selling the valuable parts of the company whilst the debt is owed by the company, which is now bankrupt and if they properly use Bankruptcy Law or even just Tax Law (by having the bankrupty of their "investment" go down on their books as a loss) they might even manage to extract a bit more money out of the rotting corpse.

AFAIK Schedule 1 is developed by a single dev still in college.

What else are they going to do? Flip burgers for minimum wage? Depends on how much they personall liked developing games relative to making big money I guess....

It massivelly depends on what changes and how well in terms of software design the whole is done, and judging from what I've seen, for multiple reasons (it's easier to exploit yound and naived developers and those don't know how to do good software design; performance tends to be a big thing in games dev and performance optiomizantion generally goes against good software design; it's an area that tends towards experimentalism rather than well though integrated software design) gamedev isn't an area of software development were software design tends to be good.

Thank you for reminding me that just like Todd Howard whoever is in charge of Mass Effect has seriously shit the bed and deserves to get fired (though it'll never happen, instead their studio will get gutted and they'll get a raise).

Seems like some former Mass Effect devs are working on a game called Exodus that looks good.