BioWare is officially done, and the internet is doing that thing where everyone grieves a studio that actually stopped existing around 2012. The New York Post rounded up the reactions, and they run from "f–king devastating" to people like me pointing at the last decade of receipts.

Let's be clear about what we lost, because it matters. BioWare made Baldur's Gate. KOTOR. Mass Effect. Dragon Age: Origins. That studio earned more goodwill from RPG fans than maybe anyone in the business. The version of BioWare that made those games was one of the greatest developers that ever touched the medium, and I will argue that with anyone.

That studio has been gone a long time, though. What closed this week was a brand name wearing its corpse like a suit. Anthem. Andromeda. Veilguard, the game that shipped with the studio's approval process baked into a dialogue tree and sold so badly EA had to publicly eat crow about it. Player counts cratered, Steam reviews told the story, and EA did what EA always does when an acquisition stops producing.

The mourning posts keep framing this as fans losing something. Which fans? The fans who got lectured by a companion about their pronoun etiquette in a fantasy game about darkspawn? The fans who watched a studio that once wrote morally gray masterpieces decide the real villain was its own audience? Every time the customers said "hey, this isn't what we paid for," somebody from that building had a quote ready about how they don't make games for those people. Okay. Mission accomplished. Nobody's getting games from you now.

The part that stings is the IP. Mass Effect and Dragon Age still have value, and EA now owns that value outright with no studio attached that anyone trusts to use it. The actual loss happened years ago, when the talent that built those worlds walked out the door and the people who stayed decided the problem was the customers. Studios don't die from wokeness directly. They die from making bad games, and they make bad games when they care more about messaging than whether the combat is fun and the story is worth a damn.

The "devastating" crowd isn't wrong to feel something. I felt it too, for about four seconds, and then I remembered I already did this grief in 2017 when Andromeda's dead-eyed cutscenes hit YouTube. Everything since has been visiting a grave.

Rest in peace to the real BioWare, the one from Edmonton that changed my life with KOTOR when I was a kid. The thing that closed this week was something else wearing the name. The scoreboard doesn't care about sentiment, and neither does EA.