One of the most historic studios is closing down. Unfortunately it was dead long ago. Fuck EA
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Ban corporate ownership of other companies. It has no positive effects on the economy or the world.
We have to just vote soulless corposuits out with our wallets. Too many business majors telling devs what to do.
Vote with your wallet is mostly a scam. You can't buy what isn't there. Devs are too reliant on the business freaks to turn their art into money. I don't have a good solution. All I can think of is maybe something like a registered not-for-profit version of steam/GOG/itch. No investors expecting a return allowed. No for-profit company that owns the not-for-profit as a bypass. Just a system devs can use to turn art into money with no BS about ensuring profits for someone else. I don't have the devops/software engineering knowledge to make that happen, but I hope someone does.
That would solve nothing.
For Bioware, no. It's too late for them. For the future, it'd prevent companies like EA buying up every half-successful dev company and feeding their IP into the machine to milk our nostalgia for profit.
But it wouldn't prevent them from buying the IP. The only thing that solves the problem is preventing ip from changing hands, but that would definitely cause problems
It would reduce it, at least. Part of what makes those deals appealing to devs is the idea that the umbrella corporation will handle the business so the devs can do the dev work they love. Many of them would be much more reluctant to sell off ownership of their concepts and work entirely, and the ubrella corps would find it harder to milk nostalgia when they've only bought the name and not any of the creative team that made it real. Not impossible, but harder.
If buying a company is illegal, there's still no (practical) way to prevent the buying company say, "we'll put you in your own separate Bioware team, no management changes for at least a year, we'll hire anyone who wants to come over" etc. Basically, you'd have the exact same situation practically, just the legal bollocks would be different and it'd be slightly less convenient.
Good. So much of adjusting people's behaviour is just making it more convenient to do the right thing and less convenient to do the wrong thing. It's impossible to get people to behave perfectly all the time, but the more inconvenient you make it to do the wrong thing, the more the human tendency toward laziness will keep them passively on the right path. There are no desire paths in a hedge maze.
But it will also make legit things slightly less convenient.
How?
Same way it makes this negative thing more inconvenient - there are legit reasons for a company to own another one, because it basically just helps organisation and accounting.
What legit reasons? Seriously. What real world situations are there where allowing companies to own companies promotes a healthy society/economy/etc.? (Not just benefitting the shareholders, and not just the accountants. That's not enough.)
Well not allowing it is just an inconvenience, as I said, so it's really a benefit for the accountants in this comparison. But if you're saying that has a big effect on discouraging the harmful form of ownership, the innocuous forms would be discouraged as well. That means also companies would be less likely to merge at all (regardless of resulting struxture) which would be unhealthy for the economy as it prevents synergising. But for the record I don't think it would have a massive effect on either case.