Mass Effect: Andromeda DLC - WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?! *Clearing Up Misconceptions* [BioFan Video

I didn't know there was a strike on. 

Yeah I thought it finished.

Jennifer Hale has been.out of work for two years...kind of funny when you think about it.

Actually, she's been working per her IMDB page. She just did some work for some cartoons and some games with Blizzard.

I don't think the voice actor strike is going to end anytime soon, since they won't talk what publishers have agreed with them and that list that is represented by that lawfirm represents two of the biggest US based publishers I don't see a lot of pressure being put on them.

Edit:
As far as I can tell the voice actors have only been on strike since October 2016.

Edit #2:
I was wrong about the year it was 2015 the strike started, I read an article incorrectly.

Literally, no one, besides the good folks at EA/BioWare, know what ME:A sold. Even the source BioFan was using for the sales numbers don't include Origin digital sales figures because EA won't release them.

I think BioWare needs new IPs in different genres so they can diversify so I'm fine with Anthem, just not a lot of interest in it.

I cannot find the articles, but when they went on strike there was information that if there was a contract signed for a game the voice work would continue.  That is why we as consumers haven't seen too much of a shift in production since the strike started.  I would expect there might be another year or so of games that have voice contracts.

First I was wrong above, the strike started October 2015.

Here is a quote I found.



And the article liked above indicates none of these publishers have a deal with the union yet.  So it seems they have made agreements with publishers that they aren't striking against.  So Depending on development cycles and how they might not push development for some games longer so they keep having titles to release such as Anthem.  It might go longer or they can look at alternates such as focusing on games with no voice acting of hiring people to cross the lines which does happen with strikes.

Still too soon and one Kotaku "Writer" is not enough info to go on as a source. The fact that other Game Newz sites just copy and pasting his story. The part of the team that moved over to Motive are there to help knock out SW Battlefront 2's Single Player Campaign. That game is slated for November and they have to get that game right the first time as they pay big money to Disney and Disney can pull the license if the game sucks so once the Single player campaign is done that team will be free to move back across the hall to do ME: A DLC so might not get any till next year

I think the Kotaku MEA development issues article is pretty much spot on.
While I believe post release always a lot of MEA staff would have been reassigned to other EA/BW games anyway, BW Montreal also paid the price for their total sum of MEA work and the whole EA/BW mismanagement. Whether that is fair or not is not the question.


It's good to see you around Biofan. I honestly missed your vids and thoughts on MEA after it's launch.


While I'm hoping for MEA SP DLC (Quarian Ark, Benefactor, Jardaan/Scourge, Ellen Ryder etc.) I think N7 day will give us a definitive answer one way or the other, if nothing has been announced before by EA/BW.
Until either happens, I hope rational and cooler heads will prevail without further damaging ME.


What I loved  about MEA:
Jump Jets, freely choose your skills if you want to, combat, the Asteroid mission with much less gravity, Kallo Jath, Drack and Dr. Lexi.

What I disliked about MEA:
bugs preventing me from completing (side) missions, enemies getting stuck outside of the game area forcing a game reload, Ryder turning invisible, those terrible face graphics/animations, no SAM mute button and too little alien/worlds diversity.

Most of those issues have hopefully been patch fixed by now, so now come the issues of an uneven story as well as hit and miss characters, all of which could be improved greatly by SP DLC.


The only reason I still have MEA on my console is the potential SP DLC and until such arrives I won't play it again.

You're basing this off of a Reddit report, relaying an Ars Technica report, featuring "a sample of 113k players, between May 25 and May 27, 2017"  which they then extrapolate to assume the data is representative of the main userbase...  That's reaching pretty hard......

VGchartz would be a much more accurate alternative:

PS4: 0.97m
XBone: 0.53m
PC: 0.10m

For a grand total of... 1.6m + digital. So,, very unlikely to have sold 4-5 million within 3 months.

Even more accurate - based on NPD Data:

March - Andromeda 3rd best-selling game.  Second place Zelda sold ~ 1.3m based on Switch sales (where Zelda sold 1:1 with the system.  So Andromeda is under 1.3m.
April - Andromeda is 7th best-selling game.
May - Andromeda is 15th best-selling game.
June - Andromeda is outside of the top 20.

So probably around 1m in March - way less in April, lets be generous and say 750k.  Way less in May, lets be generous and say 250k.  

That's 2m total sales.  NPD INCLUDEs PS4 and Xbox digital sales, just not Origin sales.  So 2m + Origin sales.  Mass Effect Andromeda MIGHT have sold 3m at this rate, total, up to the current date.  And these estimates are based on actual data from VG and NPD, NOT a 3 day sample of 113k players.


TLDR - Game sold very poorly - selling in it's first 3-4 months what EA was expecting it to sell in its first week.  The game has no legs - at this rate it'll be lucky to sell 100k in July.  It's dead. That's why there's no DLC.  And that's quite the failure.



Edit: Andromeda was also 25-35% off across multiple platforms 2 days after release, so don't bother trying to further extrapolate from Ars's 3 days sample based on full price sales. Furthermore, that 40m was the development budget, NOT the marketing budget.  EA has previously said that the marketing budget for games is 2-3x the development budget.  You do the math.