'On a pirate ship, they’d toss the captain overboard': Larian head of publishing tears into EA after BioWare layoffs waste 'institutional knowledge'

pcgamer.com:

So, BioWare probably isn't going to be making a new Dragon Age game any time soon—maybe ever, depending on how things go. After Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed, much of its team (including senior members who had been making Dragon Age games for a while) were shuffled around or laid off.

This isn't necessarily out of nowhere. As quite accurately called by consultant and former BioWare vet Mark Darrah, almost prophetically, this marks the first time the studio's only had one major project to focus on. He rather optimistically stated that these devs would find their way to other EA studios, and that the challenge would be involved in trying to get them back. Turns out, he was partly right: A lot of them are just gone entirely.

Regardless of my thoughts on the game's writing, plenty of the staff now departing have made good stuff in the past. Trick Weekes, for instance, wrote freaking Mordin in Mass Effect 2 and 3—as well as Iron Bull and Solas in Inquisition, two other characters I like very much. The foibles of Veilguard haven't left me irate so much as a little despondent, confused, and wondering whether just scrapping decades of talent in a purge is the right move at all.

That's a despondency shared by Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, who took to X in a series of posts this week that more or less tore into EA for letting go of so much institutional talent. He writes:

«It is possible not to lay off large parts of your development teams between or after projects. Critically, retaining that institutional knowledge is key for the next [game]. It’s often used as an excuse to ‘trim fat’ and to an extent I understand that under financial pressure, but doesn’t that just highlight how needless the aggressive efficiency of giant corporations is?»

Douse isn't necessarily throwing stones from a glass house, here. Larian is a big old studio, true, but it's something of an anomaly in the games industry: Tencent has a