EA shuts down BioWare: who pays when a studio changes hands

EA announced this week that it is shutting down BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, closing its Edmonton office, ending the next Mass Effect and, reportedly, cutting about 400 jobs across the company. EA had not confirmed that number when the show went live. On the seventh episode of Never Entertained, Greg Posner, Colan Neese, Simon Pulman and Stephen Lenz used it to ask a bigger question: when the money behind a studio changes hands, who ends up paying for it? The panel disagreed about whether it was fair, and mostly agreed on the economics. The show proper starts at 4:04, after a few minutes of talk about the best game soundtrack ever.

EA shuts down BioWare: the first reactions

Starts at 4:58

Greg Posner framed the story as the first big move since EA's $55 billion private equity deal. Stephen Lenz said the portfolio had been tracking down and pointed at decisions along the way: Dragon Age spent nine years in development and went from single player to multiplayer and back, and Mass Effect had been run as a series long enough to bleed. Lenz hoped some of the IP is sold to help EA with what Lenz put at $20 billion in debt. Those figures are Lenz's own.

Gaming is commerce

Starts at 6:50

Colan Neese said many people have lost the script on the plain fact that someone has to pay for a game and recoup the investment. If a studio makes games players do not want to play, the bills come due. Neese compared BioWare's share of attention since 2019 with Baldur's Gate 3, which shows players still want big RPGs, and said BioWare had been largely irrelevant for most of the decade. Neese also pointed out that people who made Knights of the Old Republic have left to build a spiritual successor elsewhere.

Nobody is immune

Starts at 9:20

Simon Pulman agreed that studios cannot survive making games players do not want, and added that they cannot survive if they are not making games. Mass Effect shipped in 2007, 2010 and 2012, three games in five years, which meant momentum and also cost. Pulman's warning was that no studio is safe: a seven or eight year build costing hundreds of millions means one bomb can doom a studio. Neese brought up Gears of War: E-Day, reportedly about $500 million to make, a figure Neese said had been confirmed that morning and which has not been independently verified here. Pulman noted that the original Gears of War cost far less, and that success cannot be judged without the budget.

What disc limits did for craft

Starts at 13:31

Posner's contribution was constraint. When a game had to fit on a DVD, teams had to find clever ways to make it work, and that is what separated good developers from great ones. With downloads, nothing is ever finished. Posner put the fault on the platform, which removed the restriction. Pulman asked whether that is the developers' fault or the consumers', and Posner held that it is the platform's.

The GTA 6 trap

Starts at 14:36

Neese's fear is that the industry will learn the wrong lesson from GTA 6. When it makes a gazillion dollars, executives will say that all they needed was a bigger budget and ten years. Pulman called GTA an outlier.

Price matters: games cost the same for twenty years

Starts at 15:02

Pulman made the case that price is the other half of the equation. The sticker price of a video game has barely moved in twenty years, Pulman argued, while budgets have risen many times over, and many players now get big games free on Game Pass. Pulman's estimate is that the original Gears of War cost somewhere between $10 million and $20 million, not adjusted for inflation. Pulman does not blame players, who have plenty of cheap and free options. The expectation of photoreal detail and a hundred hours of play can only be met by making games enormously expensive, so it becomes a vicious cycle. Neese compared it to film, where ticket prices keep rising while fewer people sit in seats. Pulman added that GTA's $100 edition is the IMAX version of the idea.

What would you do differently if you were EA?

Starts at 19:28

Posner asked the panel to say what EA could have done differently, noting that Microsoft was criticized for being too hands off and EA for being too hands on. Lenz's answer was a diverse portfolio: keep BioWare as the single player studio it was known for, hedge the bet, and avoid a lift as large as moving a narrative team to multiplayer. Pulman pushed Lenz to name what Lenz would have done six or seven years ago, and Lenz said BioWare should have stayed single player, which might also have kept more of the people.

How long does a studio stay itself after an acquisition?

Starts at 21:48

Neese asked the audience a question Neese admitted having no good answer to: how long does an acquired company keep its identity before it becomes a brand inside a larger one? Neese compared Pixar, bought by Disney about twenty years ago, and thought BioWare had a decent run at EA by those standards, even if it ended badly.

Buyers want the IP, not the team

Starts at 22:52

Pulman said layoffs follow mergers, and that the trend across film, television and games is toward bigger brands, citing what happened to Fox properties after the Disney deal. Buyers usually want the IP, not the people. Pulman expects the Mass Effect and Dragon Age IP to be sold or licensed, but noted a third-party investor would ask how much a new game costs and how long before revenue. If the answer is hundreds of millions and six or seven years, the pitch is not compelling. Pulman floated, as a small chance rather than a prediction, that a company with a Mass Effect series in development could buy the brand outright.

Creativity versus commerce

Starts at 27:15

Lenz argued that the industry needs creativity to survive and loses it when it is squeezed into a business. Pulman's reply was that creativity still exists, coming from Korea, China and Europe, and that it fits the cost problem. Pulman pointed to Blood of Dawnwalker as the model for a franchise: a smaller budget, prove the first game, then build incrementally and reuse assets, as FromSoftware does. In Pulman's view voice acting and motion capture are overvalued, and the priority has to be getting a game out in two to four years.

Private equity weighed a buyout of Xbox

Starts at 28:36

Posner turned to a report from The Information that a group of private equity firms weighed a buyout of Xbox valued at $100 billion or more. The report says it never became a negotiation, and Xbox is not for sale. Posner's question was whether the number is a compliment or a warning. Neese's read was game theory: if the AI bubble bursts, Microsoft could sell Xbox quickly, so it makes sense to hear offers, and Neese credited Asha Sharma with a strategy that makes sense.

What a buyer would actually keep

Starts at 30:10

Pulman asked what a buyer would acquire: a declining hardware business, a subscription platform, game revenue, IP and a lot of people. Neese answered that a buyer would not want the platform. The buyer would want Mojang and Activision Blizzard King, the crown jewels, and the thing the gaming press overvalues is Halo and Gears of War. Neese added that Bethesda is the example of a studio that cannot ship at the pace it used to, and Pulman added Naughty Dog and CD Projekt Red to the list of studios that could be in trouble if a next game underperforms.

The default is no

Starts at 33:19

Pulman's other warning was about attention. With so much content in every medium, Pulman said, the default answer to a new game is no, unless it has an incredibly strong brand like GTA. It only takes a few clips and some negativity for people to decide a game is not for them.

Why every big game now has to over-perform

Starts at 34:57

Posner asked what over-performing means. Pulman's answer: not user accounts but revenue, and a return of five to ten times the cost, which is why even Sable, which is tracking well, needs to succeed. Pulman called ten million copies an abject failure for GTA 6. That is an opinion. Neese said the real lever is time: a seven year build with several hundred salaried staff costs far more than a three year one.

Next Xbox pricing: $1,500 consoles and $100 games?

Starts at 36:20

Neese said Xbox is reportedly raising prices toward luxury territory, which Neese called the era of luxury gaming. Pulman made a bold prediction that if a console launches at $1,500 or more, the company will start charging $100 for games. That is the panel's speculation; no price has been announced. Neese's cynical theory was that a premium bundle would include monthly cloud hours, with a free ad-supported tier at the other end, and Pulman called that a set of pricing ladders. Posner doubted that advertising can grow without limit; Neese pointed to Google, Meta and Amazon.

Smart TVs, YouTube Premium and the ad business

Starts at 38:36

A tangent on a post claiming a Samsung TV takes a screenshot every few seconds led to a discussion of ad tech, privacy and AI, and Pulman's view as an attorney that the ship has sailed in the United States unless AI draws regulators in. The panel then compared YouTube Premium and the cost of the NFL's Sunday Ticket.

The Frankenstein FPS

Starts at 42:54

Posner asked whether shooters might break apart the way real-time strategy did, into arena, extraction and other subgenres, as the genre seems to converge around the same studios.

Marvel Rivals and the clone playbook

Starts at 44:21

Neese said the biggest disruption in shooters comes from smaller players whose games cost far less than the Call of Duty and Battlefield class. Neese's main example was Marvel Rivals, which in that telling came from NetEase working with former Blizzard staff and Marvel, a small team in North America and cheaper talent overseas, and a live service model that adds Marvel heroes indefinitely. Neese thinks competition improved Overwatch. The winners, Neese added, are tied to the platforms that promote them, which is why Counter-Strike is safe on Steam.

Shooters grow on creator hours

Starts at 46:01

Neese's other point was that shooters mostly grow by paying creators to play them. EA can put a dump truck of money behind Battlefield 6 and guarantee eyeballs, which smaller games cannot do. Pulman asked whether the audience is growing or the same people are being split up; Neese answered that it is growing, but not where shooter publishers want it.

Roblox shooters and Free Fire's mobile empire

Starts at 47:28

According to Neese, shooters are appearing in Roblox and mobile is where the Western industry has not figured it out. Neese described Garena's Free Fire as a huge mobile shooter, popular in places such as India, Brazil and Latin America, with a standard version for low-spec phones and a Max version for high-end ones that can play together, and with a content engine built on TikTok creators. The point was that lower revenue per player means ads and other ways to monetize.

Is the $70 game the future of everything?

Starts at 49:35

Neese said the theme of the episode is an honest conversation about how to monetize an audience: the old model of selling a thing once, or giving it away and monetizing players forever, is not the forever business model, with the exception of Nintendo. Pulman agreed Nintendo can do it and added that low-budget indie games can too. Neese credited Nintendo with discipline about cost and a focus on playability.

Astro Bot, PlayStation 6 and the GTA 6 trap

Starts at 51:26

Pulman asked why Sony has not followed up Astro Bot. Neese said it could have been marketed more and asked where the sequel is. The panel then argued about PlayStation 6: Pulman expects a long cross-generation period, and Neese said the trap for the industry is that GTA 6 will make people ask why they would buy new hardware if it looks like that on a PS5 Pro. Pulman's answer was that the bottleneck is time and money, not hardware, and that the cathedral builders of AAA do not have a successor. Neese said a PS6 at the purported price is a pass, and expects Switch 2 to hold the line.

What's keeping us entertained

Starts at 56:16

Lenz is going back to Borderlands 2 and Diablo 2. Neese and Pulman both recommended the film You Can See Everything. Pulman is reading the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book and playing a bit of a new game, and Posner is playing the new Call of Duty, which launched that day, and hoping to find time for Control. Next week is Halloween: bring your top Halloween games.

What an operator should take from it

First, price a game against its time, not only its budget: the cost that sinks studios is the years of salary before revenue. Second, expect buyers to value IP and proven franchises over teams, and plan for what you own if your studio is ever acquired. Third, treat the default answer of players as no. Every new game, update and feature has to earn attention in a market with more to play than anyone has time for.

Keep going

Catch the replay, and join Never Entertained live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Get the argument in your inbox every Tuesday with The Operator's Briefing.

Argue with the panel in the Player Driven Discord.