I’d argue slightly before. EA purchased them about the same time Mass Effect came out, which means they didn’t play a part in development. I would say Mass Effect was the beginning of the end for them. Yeah, it was great, but it was the game where they started dumbing things down and moving away from the CRPG into bland action games. Mass Effect was the start of the path towards Anthem and then trying to make Dragon Age into a multiplayer live-service thing, which ended up as Veilguard.
I said it was great. It was just the start of the path to failure. It wasn’t immediately bad, but they were removing the things that made the games special.
Oddly enough, of their top 10 best selling games, Mass Effect was the lowest, and newer games were better selling. So sales figures say otherwise. Dumbing things down is bad for one audience, but good for another.
I wonder how much this is because of dumbing down, and how much it is because the market got larger. For example in the year 2002, The Sims was the highest selling game of all time, at ~6 million copies.
At the time, the perception of video games was still a hobby of sweaty nerds. Some years later the Wii launched, and it became really popular as a family console. It had some sports games, and I think it did a lot to get a foothold on a more general market. Games weren’t just for sweaty nerds anymore. Although even then, a lot of people didn’t play games.
Then at some point the marketing shifted. Games had broader stories, they tried for more mass-market appeal by selling cinematic experiences and whatnot (remember the awful QTE era of like the late-2000s early 2010s?)
At that point, I think gaming in general had broadened its appeal. A lot of people had consoles, PC hardware wasn’t prohibitively expensive, etc.
I don’t doubt that dumbing down games has had an effect, by making things simpler and flattening the learning curve you make it more accessible. That’s a given. But I also think gaming becoming a more generally accessible and socially acceptable past time was a big contributor.
Once smart phones came along the mobile game market exploded, and I think that’s still the biggest market segment, though it’s moved on from its original simple puzzle games into bigger experiences, some that even translate decently well over to other mediums.
PS1 did a lot to legitimize gaming, probably more than Wii. Up to the SNES/Genesis generation, consoles in particular were perceived as kids’ toys. With PS1, Sony and Psygnosis (who did a lot of legwork for Sony) advertised it to college-age folks, hiring The Designers Republic¹ to make the marketing materials for the console and the style of ‘Wipeout’; they put contemporary edm music in the game, made some edgy ads, and organized gaming rooms in fifty nightclubs in the UK alone. PS1 singlehandedly changed the audience of consoles away from just kids, for which Sony thanked Psygnosis by renaming them to SCE Studio Liverpool, making them develop just the ‘Wipeout’ and ‘Formula One’ series, and shutting them down altogether in 2012.
Now guess what people who were in college in 1995, were doing in early-mid 2000s. And note also that Nintendo never really switched away from targeting their games to kids.
¹ The Designers Republic did cover design for many IDM producers, which genre popped up in early-mid 1990s — folks like Autechre, LFO and Aphex Twin, and specifically the Warp label, likewise based in Sheffield. Their design was pretty much the ‘face of ambient techno’.
Yeah, but now we miss out on playing a rushed mass effect game and getting to complain about it not measuring up for a couple weeks. Now I have to find something new to do in August 2027
Eh. Bioware died a long time ago.
Alternate headline:
“The reanimated corpse of your loved one is now at peace.”
Right. Sucks for the people working there, but the BioWare we miss was already gone, so it doesn’t hurt that much.
Yeah when EA purchased them.
ThatsTheJoke.jpg
I’d argue slightly before. EA purchased them about the same time Mass Effect came out, which means they didn’t play a part in development. I would say Mass Effect was the beginning of the end for them. Yeah, it was great, but it was the game where they started dumbing things down and moving away from the CRPG into bland action games. Mass Effect was the start of the path towards Anthem and then trying to make Dragon Age into a multiplayer live-service thing, which ended up as Veilguard.
Mass Effect 1 & 2 were great though…
I said it was great. It was just the start of the path to failure. It wasn’t immediately bad, but they were removing the things that made the games special.
Oddly enough, of their top 10 best selling games, Mass Effect was the lowest, and newer games were better selling. So sales figures say otherwise. Dumbing things down is bad for one audience, but good for another.
https://gamerant.com/highest-selling-games-developed-bioware-ranked-how-much-sold/
I wonder how much this is because of dumbing down, and how much it is because the market got larger. For example in the year 2002, The Sims was the highest selling game of all time, at ~6 million copies.
At the time, the perception of video games was still a hobby of sweaty nerds. Some years later the Wii launched, and it became really popular as a family console. It had some sports games, and I think it did a lot to get a foothold on a more general market. Games weren’t just for sweaty nerds anymore. Although even then, a lot of people didn’t play games.
Then at some point the marketing shifted. Games had broader stories, they tried for more mass-market appeal by selling cinematic experiences and whatnot (remember the awful QTE era of like the late-2000s early 2010s?)
At that point, I think gaming in general had broadened its appeal. A lot of people had consoles, PC hardware wasn’t prohibitively expensive, etc.
I don’t doubt that dumbing down games has had an effect, by making things simpler and flattening the learning curve you make it more accessible. That’s a given. But I also think gaming becoming a more generally accessible and socially acceptable past time was a big contributor.
Once smart phones came along the mobile game market exploded, and I think that’s still the biggest market segment, though it’s moved on from its original simple puzzle games into bigger experiences, some that even translate decently well over to other mediums.
PS1 did a lot to legitimize gaming, probably more than Wii. Up to the SNES/Genesis generation, consoles in particular were perceived as kids’ toys. With PS1, Sony and Psygnosis (who did a lot of legwork for Sony) advertised it to college-age folks, hiring The Designers Republic¹ to make the marketing materials for the console and the style of ‘Wipeout’; they put contemporary edm music in the game, made some edgy ads, and organized gaming rooms in fifty nightclubs in the UK alone. PS1 singlehandedly changed the audience of consoles away from just kids, for which Sony thanked Psygnosis by renaming them to SCE Studio Liverpool, making them develop just the ‘Wipeout’ and ‘Formula One’ series, and shutting them down altogether in 2012.
Now guess what people who were in college in 1995, were doing in early-mid 2000s. And note also that Nintendo never really switched away from targeting their games to kids.
¹ The Designers Republic did cover design for many IDM producers, which genre popped up in early-mid 1990s — folks like Autechre, LFO and Aphex Twin, and specifically the Warp label, likewise based in Sheffield. Their design was pretty much the ‘face of ambient techno’.
A very fair point.
Yeah, but now we miss out on playing a rushed mass effect game and getting to complain about it not measuring up for a couple weeks. Now I have to find something new to do in August 2027
It has been a long time since I bought an EA game, yeah. Bioware was their only developer that I cared for.
True, they have been on a trash slop run and this is the inevitable result.