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Ex–Dragon Age Producer Calls EA A ‘Hedge Fund With A Video Game Hobby
Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not do well. The game did not sell the millions Electronic Arts wanted it to, BioWare was cut to the bone in the months that followed, and now the RPG powerhouse is a one-game studio working exclusively on a new Mass Effect . What does the future of Dragon Age look like? Does it even have one? Former series producer Mark Darrah is not hopeful.
“The problem is I don’t know who at BioWare would pitch a Dragon Age ,” Darrah, who left BioWare in 2021 after 23 years at the studio, recently told FRVR (via PC Gamer ). "So the other option is somebody else within the EA organization decides they’re gonna pitch a Dragon Age , and what I expect would happen if they try to do that is somebody at BioWare would essentially become one of those people jumping under the vents to rip that person apart. I suspect that it wouldn’t happen for a variety of reasons."
He noted that EA currently controls lots of dormant IPs, and mentioned the publisher's sprawling scale and the way its annualized sports franchises outperform one-off hits. “I think it was happening because of EA’s complicated relationship to shipping games at all,” Darrah said of the long time it took Veilguard to eventually ship. “Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a video game hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true.”
The veteran producer doesn't paint a promising picture of Dragon Age 's future, or even BioWare's for that matter, as EA prepares to close its leveraged buyout to a consortium of investors, the biggest one of which is Saudi Arabia. "If you’re in the Saudi investment, do you want a Dragon Age game to exist?" he asked rhetorically. "I could argue yes and no…do you want BioWare at all in this world?”
BioWare would certainly be far from the first acquisition EA later ruined.
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