Canadian politician calls on government to help BioWare employees buy the studio and run it themselves
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mass-effect/canadian-politician-calls-on-government-to-help-bioware-employees-buy-the-studio-and-run-it-themselves/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
13 replies
Good call.
Can you imagine happy game developers and what the potential might be?
Yeah. Apparently in the '90s, bioware was a very excellent company to work for, and two of my uni peers went there. They produced some great titles.
Isn’t Double Fine a good example of this, having recently split from Xbox Game Studios?
From what I can tell Tim Schafer seems like a genuinely good guy to work for/with.
I mean, the question then becomes do they then become that which threatened to destroy them?
The politician is Avi Lewis, leader of the (federal) NDP, and it's a good call. Nuking the Bioware studio in Edmonton is a major blow to a blossoming industry in Alberta that has been building around their success for the last 30 years.
Alberta needs more than oil and gas, and helping when EA's decision threatens to ruin 30 years of game dev industry growth here overnight is how we ensure that can happen. There is undoubtedly people that Bioware attracted to computer science and software development attending the U of A, Grant MacEwen, and other tech schools in Edmonton today who were planning to, or hoping to stay here for their career. They're in class wondering WTF just happened and assuming they'll have to leave Alberta to follow the industry... Vancouver and Montreal are calling to them.
We should show them we give a fuck about what's been built here. That's a pipeline worth paying into, imho.
Hell yeah. This is a bailout I can get behind!
We need Steelco and BioWare as new crown corporations, c'mon Carney Liberals be centrist instead of conservatives.
Standing Stone games did it with Warner Brothers. Dungeons & Dragons online never shut down, it’s owned by the devs now.
Couldn't this be better litigated as a criminally bad business decision that took the most valuable thing in the industry and smashed it to pieces?
Would they get the IP though? I think BioWare has a lot of talent, but creating successful new IP is no joke. I'm guessing EA and its overlords won't let the IP go easily.
If they retained some of the talent (specifically the writers) they could make another Mass Effect adjacent game and call it something else. The articles start writing themselves, "The main people behind Mass Effect are working a new game."
I don't think it has to be a "triple A" game to be a commercial success.
Companies reinventing themselves has been done before many times (Black Isle Studios -> Obsidian; Squaresoft -> Square -> Square Enix; Konami -> Kojima Productions) and the Canadian government has thrown money at fiscally riskier projects.
I feel like this sets a precedent that companies can just extort the government over layoffs.
Very different outcomes than corporate bailouts. It would literally move means of production into workers' hands. Reduces the size of the private capital controlled part of the economy. Easier to see if you picture it done routinely for failing companies with otherwise profitable enough businesses for their employees. You'd end up with a large socialist sector comprised of democratically owned and run firms that owe debt to the state.
Initially these firms may not be able to produce the yearly return to external shareholders to be considered profitable investments by private capital, but they might be able to make enough profit to pay worker salaries and upkeep. That alone is a big win for their local economies. Some would grow. Others would fail. The quality of life and/or pay would improve in the survivers.