The only thing I find surprising about this is how long it seemed to take to reach this point. At least to me, it seems patently obvious you could easily have made this decision at least 6-8 months ago. Beyond a poor corporate attempt at saving face, I can't quite fathom what they were hoping to accomplish by working on it even this long. A team that size was never going to be able to overhaul the game on their own COVID or no COVID. At the same time, the team was also big enough and this farce went on long enough that they must have incurred a fairly substantial cost for ultimately no benefit.
And even if they had been able to put out a solid proof of concept for how to fix the game, I don't understand what the plan for covering the development cost was going to be? We aren't talking a nip and tuck here - the entire foundation of the game was so rotten that pretty much everything would have needed to be rebuilt to get people back in the door. That would have been really expensive, and I don't see a way for them to make back the budget.
Selling the new version of the game, even at a discounted price point, was never going to fly. The game has microtransactions, but that was likely to be a no-go too. For that to work, they would have needed a solid player base to actually . . . um . . . transact with the microtransactions.
One would hope that this would lead to a lot of soul searching at both BioWare and EA, since this is far from an isolated occurrence. When I read the Schreier article on Anthem, I was struck by how much crossover there was to the one that he wrote for Mass Effect Andromeda. It really felt like he had about 80% of the thing already written because the problems were so similar - issues with Frostbite, game directors that couldn't make up their mind, poor employee morale from crunching to finish, and a general arrogance in believing in the "BioWare Magic(tm)."
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