The Dragon Age and Mass Effect series have probably had the best portrayal of LGBTQ+, women and minorities in general of any video game series. I found the way Veilguard handled being trans for example, absolutely incredible and powerful. They clearly put a lot of thought and care and clearly had diverse pool of devs who consulted with the right people. future BioWare games will probably backslide massively on queer themes and LGBTQ+ inclusion and other ‘woke’ things?
Imagine if you can only be a straight white cis man only romance straight cis women in the next dragon age game, with no queer people in sight. It wouldn’t even feel like dragon age anymore!
Is there even going to be a next Dragon Age? I got the impression that Bioware is basically circling the drain currently
If we’re talking about EA and LGBT inclusion, what about The Sims? Probably the largest percentage of female and LGBT players of any game
Agreed. I still wasn’t convinced we’d actually see a new proper Mass Effect, never mind yet another Dragon Age, even before this rumor and then confirmation of a buyout.
But yeah, the Sims seems like the obvious target if they were gonna try and meddle in studio culture and go after ‘woke’ output. Maxis has rightly taken some criticisms for moving too slow on representation issues in the past but they’re way beyond most big studios on inclusion when it comes to race, gender, trans-inclusivity, and increasingly differently abled and medical representation. A lot of the vibe of the studio and game is also extremely utopian-corporate, ultra-tolerance, progressive-lib in a way that’s probably a bigger red cape for the de-woke-business types than even something/somewhere actually more leftist.
Private equity that does leveraged buyouts doesn’t plan on really making anything with the companies they buy, they buy them to strip the copper from the walls to sell for scrap and then shut it down after they’ve made billions and straddled the company with an impossible debt load. It’s more likely we’ll see them sell off IP than actually try to influence anything, in any way other than to make it cheaper to produce.
I agree and I think that’s the most likely outcome. I just was continuing on from the previous comments that if there’s a cultural control over profit aspect to this as there has been in some of the other media spaces (social, news) it’d seem an obvious target. Generally though, especially with the majority coming from the Saudi investment fund, I think the motive is just just profitable assets and more soft power in sports.
I can see them not touching the Sims too much since being inclusive is such a huge part of the brand and the main audience is women and non-gamers in general. I can imagine the new owners wanting to de-emphasise LGBT themes in franchises they see as more capital G Gamer oriented though. Bioware titles have been underperforming for like a decade now and every release has had a reactionary gamer backlash