How can one above average game sink an entire franchise?

EA want a lot of money here and now. If Andromeda made even 10-20% less profits they expected, that's more enough for them to shut the whole thing.

Bad project management + harsher than usual reviews + high expectations + a rabid section of the internet waiting for a reason = ME is/may be at risk.


To be honest, BioWare should haven aware of the latter two, so they have no excuse for the former one.

EA gets a lot of hate, but I place this failure squarely on Bioware and their incompetent management.

Yes, it can. See Dead Space 3.

Now, ME is not gone, it's just resting.

Of course, but have EA do anything about it ? I don't see any big names from BioWare dropped after MEA blamage.
No one takes responsibility.

But seriously, it's prolly going to be OK.

It probably wasn't just one game. It was ME3's ending + a bad game + EA's focus on Anthem which may or may not be a precursor to shifting Bioware's gears entirely away from the SP market.

And it's probably not done forever. They just need nostalgia to overcome reservations wrt the franchise.

There's one fundamental criteria. Some people tend to hold a romantic view when it comes to games. They view them as art, as a labor of love. Nothing could be further from the truth. This game had a 40 million budget and tied quite a lot of manpower to one single project for half of a decade. At the foundations of this is a business plan. There's market research and based on that, there are projections on return of investment and what is considered a success or a failure. So, even if this broke even or provided a moderate revenue, this may not be enough for funds and manpower invested, according to the original plan.

None of us knows this plan, that's why I always keep arguing that throwing around sales numbers - even they are not fully accessable to us - leads exactly nowhere. Not without knowing what the original business plan looked like.

It's useless to speculate if the franchise is continued or not. That's not for us to know, unless they promote the next game in the series. A company will never say, they're discontinuing any franchise that is able to make people all emotional. Company statements so far lead to the conclusion that they're not satisfied with the reception and the sales. But to what extent they are dissatisfied, again, isn't for us to know without knowing their original expectations.

Maybe I can offer some feedback as an OT player who hasn't played a single second of Andromeda.

It may have been named "Mass Effect" but it doesn't particularly feel like Mass Effect to me. Mass Effect is the story of superhero and his/her sworn retainers on a quest to save the Milky Way. But these characters have no impact on Andromeda. And it's not even in the Milky Way anymore. So everything that I got attached to over three games has been washed away. Unless the gameplay was truly revolutionary, it just wasn't going to pique my interest; and it didn't.

Maybe the Andromeda characters are good. But I don't care. They aren't the characters I got attached to. It's not even the same setting I got attached to. And I don't mind having to adjust to new characters or scenery. My favorite game series, The Elder Scrolls, is built around a cycle where each protagonist (and almost the entire supporting cast) disappears after each installment. But I knew this going in, and I knew what to expect, and therefore this doesn't bother me.

But with Mass Effect, I got so invested into the series because of all the characters and the like, and Bioware washed it away to make way for a new game. Those characters were at the core of what made me a fan of Mass Effect to begin with, and so with them removed, I removed myself from having any real interest in playing Andromeda.

I sunk a lot of money into the OT. Not just three games and their myriad DLC, but t-shirts, knickknacks, and other such goodies. But not only do I not have any Andromeda merch; I don't have Andromeda, and I have no desire to even bother playing it. If Bioware had gone the Rogue Squadron route and said "We're still going to make the main series, but here's Andromeda, a neat little side story!" I'd definitely have gotten Andromeda and given it a chance. But with the essence of the main series all but gone, it feels like a waste of time to even bother.

Maybe I'm an outlier. I'm not the Lorax or anything; I don't speak for anyone or anything else as far as I'm aware. But I'd be willing to bet that for one reason or another, a good number of people just never bothered (and never will bother) with Andromeda for reasons not terribly dissimilar to mine.

So in summary im afraid of new things because of nostalgia? yes i know how that feels. Take final fantasy befor and after Sakaguchi left for example, its just not the same. Andromeda however is not a betrayal, like FFXIII or FFX-2, even if it is a dissapointment. Frankly im rather impressed they managed to pull a game of even this caliber reading how damn messy the production was, from the kotaku article and all.

Also someone has already probably said this but it is indeed totally unfair to compare one games worth of characters to 3 games, they just dont compare. I would have liked too see myself how Andromedas cast would have grown, in multiple games, but i dont think theres a chance for that now, or a minimal chance at best. Such a shame.

A normal developer/studio should love their own creation,so what if a book,movie,game tanks,there are tons of story's to tell,the next one will be so much better.

EA on the other hand is a publisher,it care's about sales,there is no love,only cash and how much cash a product makes........if a game does not make money,it goes in the bin,it's a bad investment.

Hence why EA's portfolio is full of shooters and sports......cos that's what sells.