Four factors that will decide the future of Mass Effect

Rampant speculation aside, I cover the four primary factors from a business standpoint that will decide the fate of Mass Effect.

[steverogers]

Wow, this is actually calm and rational take on Mass Effect, we need more of this.

[samuelkorger]

I appreciate your more “business” perspective on the ME situation. Objectivity seems to be in short supply on this topic.

[joethealternativegamer]

In the short term I see EA doing a remaster is the trilogy. Either by this year or next year. They are doing it with burnout paradise and that is good. I hope to see it for Mass Effect, Dead Space And Army Of Two.

You’re breakdowns are logical and well done. I like how you do heavily consider the business aspect which plays a huge part in this and it is something that is missed in many discussions.

Keep these videos coming 😀

[LoganSSalas]

I am playing the trilogy for the first time ever. Mass Effect is now my favorite series and I’m actually going to give Andromeda a chance. Thank you for making a video that approached the situation in a calm manner. Good work my dude

[crzces]

I do not know what EA’s problem is with single player games. The 10 top selling games of the year were literally split 50/50 single player/multiplayer, with Mass Effect fricken Andromeda being in the top 10 in unit sales until November 2017 according to NPD and it finished the year at 14 I believe.

Horizon Zero Dawn, Resident Evil 7 (which for months was behind ME:A and HZD in the 7 best selling game of the year, as the 3 were within 500k copies of each other until October when RE:7 dropped back to 10, HZD moved up to 5 when the expansion released, and ME: A dropped to 8...

Anyway, HZD, RE7, Zelda, Persona, AC: Origins, Wildlands, and quite a few others showed that SP games sell. They sell expansion DLC, ME used to sell multiplayer micros well, and changing Mass Effect to an even more online focused shared world would just be a waste of money.

Bioware fans aren’t mad at Anthem because they think it ruined Andromeda (well maybe some are, but whatever), most are let down because their fans; millions upon millions, built up since 1998 (I’m one of them, that has every game they have ever released, getting pretty much all of them on day 1 or 2 of release), do not want this type of game. At all.

If you have a fan base of, say 25 million, at least 20% of which will buy any single player game you release (ME: A certainly showed how loyal the fans were with over 5 million total units sold even though it’s been free on Origin since September), and you insist on, or are forced to, release a game in a genre your fans are not interested in from you at all, then compound that by telling them that what they revere most about your games, story, lore, and characters, will be mostly ignored as things are as they are...because science fantasy.

I get wanting to draw in new fans, but there is already a Warframe (that actually has a damn good story), Destiny 1 & 2, The Division, R6S, along with numerous others coming; what is EA, Bioware, or both, thinking? “Let’s alienate fans who are already disappointed with ME: A as a game, the way we handled it, and the awful exposure some of our own employees gave it before launch. We will make a game that goes against all of Bioware’s strengths and fan preference because it’s a service. Genius!”

“Then, if it fails, we’ll blame Bioware. Maybe we can get a dev to come out and say they wanted to use the Frostbite engine even though the first 3 years of development were done in Unreal 4 and the assets won’t be usable in the new engine! Then we can get more to come out and infer that Bioware was going to go bankrupt were it not for EA saving them...” (wait, though already did the latter two).

EA needs to step back and look at their studios and ip’s, see how and if they fit what they want to do, then make a decision.

I’d love EA to release or sell the companies they think do not fit, but they don’t do that. That could be competition down the road with the mere company names, never mind the ip’s.

I hope Anthem does amazingly average. Hitting the low end of sales estimates with, in a semi-perfect scenario, players completely boycotting microtransactions.

Then Dragonage 4 gets made and sells like The Witcher 3, and micros are not purchased, while whatever multiplayer they throw in is ignored.

EA won’t want even more competition in the looter shooter genre, if DA: 4 is big and there is a consistent clamoring for Mass Effect, hopefully that will be enough to spur EA into making another Science Fiction/Fantasy story driven action crpg again. If the story in ME: A, more to the point, the writing itself, was on par with previous games, the bugs would not have been the focus of the game. You can “technically” fix a game, but without a large expansion DLC, they could not fix the writing. I actually do not blame them for not making it, as if it’s going to cost $15 million usd and you will be lucky to sell 1 million copies, it doesn’t make much sense to pull the dev power away from other projects to do it.

Honestly, I just want there to be a balance between both publishers, devs, and consumers where we get the games we enjoy, and they get enough money to keep giving them to us. When a 400% roi net *profit* is too low, it does not seem like publishers are being fair to their devs or fans.

[nikki]

Realistically if anthem and da4 are hits then maybe we’ll see an announcement in 2020.

[dark_fire_ice]

No matter what Mass Effect as we know is dead for the foreseeable future. And whether is a Lazarus or Frankenstein resurrection will be determined by EA's board of directors vision of the future. And personally most leader in industry are following the Nero model

[FlowerKnight]

listening to you speak about EA, and Mass Effect and what not gave me a lightly off topic idea.
Some may hate this idea, but I think it sounds fucking cool.

With the two in a row failures that is Star Wars Battlefront EA, what if Dice was tasked with creating a first person multiplayer spin off game of Mass Effect, it could play much like Battlefield and Battlefront, only be based in the Mass Effect universe and could take place during various conflicts of the ME universe, such as the First Contact War, Krogan Rebellions, The Geth War, or even during the Reaper War.
Only instead of playing as Commander Shepard, or really anyone of large significance, we play as grunts. Soldiers of the Human Alliance, or Cerberus, Turians, etc.

I just feel like Mass Effect offers such a rich universe, that it shouldn't be limited to just it's main games. It's a lot like Star Wars in that regard, there is so much that could be offered, but we've only dipped our toes into it.
I think EA should be stripped of their rights to Star Wars, and start using the Mass Effect universe as a playing field for new games.

Even this whole loot shooter thing could have been based in the Mass Effect universe, playing as mercenaries taking on various contracts, there's so much potential with ME, I just want to see it explored.

[coffeebreakhero]

I was looking forward so another trilogy with lots of DLC so bad :(

[WeeWeeJumbo]

This sounds like a very long winded way to say that the BioWare and the Mass Effect any normal human ever cared about, are surely gone forever

[ddsjgvk]

I would be more hyped for anthem (hype level 0)if it was set in the mass effect universe. Be a specter or something

[warp]

Nice analysis! Seems to me, Anthem is already well on its way to being a colossal train wreck due to a rather lame story concept (that we've all seen before in the Crysis games and games like Destiny that Anthem is a knock off of. There's nothing new or very exciting here folks, just please ignore the man behind the curtain), EA's over dependence on extortive loot-box gambling and pay-to-win mechanics (that everyone except them is generally focused on outlawing), repetitive and boring game play (yeah, doing nothing but "shooting anything that moves" in an overly hostile environment with random strangers using increasingly over powered weapons will get boring pretty quickly). They could have easily saved Andromeda, with much less effort than they poured into Anthem, with a few good DLC's and eventual sequels - and their sabotage and then abandon of Andromeda for infinite dollar signs they expected from Anthem (before the SWBF2 disaster, a disaster of their own greedy making) will be a decision that'll come back to haunt them.

At this point, I don't see BioWare being in a position to "fix" Mass Effect any time within the next 5 years or so, no matter how things turn out with Anthem. Their best bet would be the sell the Mass Effect IP off to a smaller and more creative studio (like BioWare was before EA ruined them), while it still has some value as a brand.

I'll be astounded if they waste the money to try to re-master the old Mass Effect trilogy, since that is unlikely to recoup even their basic costs - with the small population of hard core, old school gamers and new players it would probably attract. Who truly wants to slog through the unpolished mess of ME:1 all over again, even though it was "great" for its time? We want a new and exciting story (of which, with fixes, Andromeda was a creditable start), not a rehash of an old story - with some occasional missteps of its own, like the miserably lame ending to ME:3 (that if I was an investor, I'd still be furious about) - that everyone already knows. Good bet they'll loose their shirts on this if they try it - so I don't see them taking that risk.

No, EA has come pretty close to pushing BioWare over the cliff or into the black hole - so it'll be sadly interesting to see if they can survive Anthem at all. I don't see DA:4 saving the day either - that franchise has always been a lot less interesting than Mass Effect - and may already be "done" after their previous missteps that drove their player base away there too.

Keep up the good work - subscribing!

[lukasopalka]

From Kotaku Article, is quite obvious that if Anthem fails Bioware is done for. Anthem is literally their last chance.

[erichale]

This is complete naivety. The entire death of Andromeda was because of the critical analysis of the game. And the criticism was complete and utter nonsense. I played the game patched and patchless none of the overarching failures were real in a sensible way. Yet EA caves to the heckler veto. This seems to be ea's new stance no business activity falls to the loudest minority unless they have given up on capitalism