The best devs tend to instill a studio-wide culture that survives after people leave. You mentor and promote the right people, to keep the vision going. It doesn’t guarantee that your studio can survive losing key people, but it better equips them to try to.
EA basically murdered Bioware slowly. They bought the company, the founders cashed out, and then rather than trying to understand what they just bought, and how to nurture that for more great games - they just put them to work cranking out sequels, and then establishing another studio that was basically treated like a lesser son, mandating multiplayer modes, throwing in “surprise mechanics”, and rushing out games to meet business deadlines instead of because they were actually ready.
They did the same thing to Visceral. Make a neat little horror game. Okay good, make a sequel. Okay cool, now make another sequel and put in microtransactions, lighten the tone to try and appeal to a mass audience, and also you need to sell an absurd number of copies now or this will be considered a failure and you’re all out of a job.
Christ, even DICE haven’t been immune to this, going from a small studio making online Battlefield games, to being expected to make epic Call of Duty competitors, and all of the business clusterfuckery around the Battlefront games.
EA are the worst, and Andrew Wilson might be the worst CEO in the industry right now (which is really saying something, in an industry that also contains Bobby Kotick and Strauss Zelnick). If it weren’t for Ultimate Team taking off like a rocket, revenue-wise, they’d be in huge trouble.
That interview makes clear that he has absolutely no idea why Anthem failed, or even that there’s a problem with Bioware at all, beyond that they failed to be “elastic” enough to fulfill EA’s idiotic expectations of them.
