One of the industry’s most respected studios doesn’t appear in Develop’s definitive list of the best 100 developers in the world – why?
The 2011 edition of the Develop 100 – which you can find here – lists studios solely by their total average Metacritic scores in 2010.
Under this framework, BioWare didn’t even average high enough to make it into the list of top 200 developers. Top 300? Sadly not. Look lower.
It seems impossible. On face value, this one of those rare occasions when the statistics aren’t telling the entire truth, surely?
EA is laying off an unknown number of individuals from across its Battlefield teams, including workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios, IGN understands.
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When logic meets EA it generates anti-matter ..... so try not to apply it in any meaningful way. Entropy is what matters in there !!
cue the apologist saying that these are mostly just contractors hired for this specific project bla bla bla
The free-to-play reboot topped 15 million players in under three weeks, but EA now claims it needs to reshape the development team.
The community warned them this would happen but nope they knew better they continued with the live service push the made the art style cartoonish and this is the result
It's always so bizarre when studios announce something super early in development under the suggestion of forming the game to player feedback, and then they push against all feedback heading straight for the cliff while everyone is warning them along the way
The Congressional Labor Caucus sent a letter to the FTC warning the debt-financed, largely PIF-owned deal could be bad news for workers
lol ya think? they're sending all that work to the cheaper labor market as soon as possible. and FYI, that labor market has exploded in the last 5-10 years. They have enough people to replace every single job. But honestly, EA is over filled with useless upper management as it is. You could probably trim 25% of their staff with no real loss in production. They aren't gamers, they're business execs. Just look at how many AI related jobs they're already starting to post. Its also hilarious that PIF owns Battle field 6
Wait,
The same congress that attacked Lina Khan when she fought the Microsoft Activision purchase.
The same congress that allowed Disney to buy 90% of Fox
The same congress that allowed Liv Golf to buy the PGA
The same congress that sits back while Paramount tries a hostile takeover despite losing the bid for Warner Bros.
NOW, the suddenly cares about doing what's "right" for works? Yeah, right.
EA now owned by The Saudis and Ubisoft to inevitably be owned by China. In hindsight, once EA and Ubisoft started having their financial woes, they should have pulled a Koei Tecmo/Bandai Namco by merging their operations into one.
Hopefully they'll learn from this and not make ME3 as crappy as DA2. Up until DA2 they were the best of western rpg makers, second only to Bethesda in my opinion. But the scores speak for themselves. I still have tremendous hope for BioWare, I just hope EA gives them enough independence to continue their long history of amazing games and not just churn out half finished games as fast as possible to make quick money with no regard for quality.
As wary as I am of BioWare now I don't think the fact that they didn't make it on "Develop’s definitive list of the best 100 developers" is that big of a deal. Since it's going by Metacritic scores, which are unreliable to begin with, any developer who made one successful game for the iPhone would rank higher than a company that made multiple games for consoles and PCs.