What do you think about Bioware laying off 50 employees to facilitate agile development as they claim? It seems like everyone is either saying Bioware is Bioware in name only or that the next dragon age and Mass effect games is going to be shit.
I'm not sure they ever claimed to be making the cuts to support agile development as a software development methodology, per se. Agile is more about how individual teams breakdown/prioritize stories to facilitate changing requirements as opposed to, say, waterfall. And you can scale agile shops from a dev team of 6 people to a team of 6,000. Chopping 50 people isn't going to make the organization itself adhere to Agile principles any better. Besides, the messaging from Bioware itself seems to indicate that it's more about "being agile" in the "a small team can pivot more easily" sense than it is about capital-A agile software development. Still, "We fired a bunch of people so we can actually be more productive!" is just corporate spin on what is unequivocally bad news.
I think part of the reason people are saying the company's now "Bioware in name only" is because of the big, longstanding names being let go. People who had been there for literally decades and were responsible for writing a lot of beloved titles, from Dragon Age games to Baldur's Gate 1. Hollowing out the old guard as part of generic mass layoffs is never a great sign.
And neither is cutting ties with a unionized QA service. Treating QA contractors like dirt seems to be a common industry practice, though, so who knows if it's proper union busting or simply exercising the ability to cut contractor heads on a whim to save some scratch? It doesn't really matter, I guess: it's an evil move either way.
As to the impact on the games? Only time will tell. The only people that know the internal state of the studio and its projects are the people who are (or were recently) employed there. Maybe they're cutting headcount because some EA accountant demanded burn rate be reduced? This post is EA mentioning how they're going to reduce 6% of their workforce - maybe it just took a while for Bioware to get impacted for some arcane reason? Maybe some unannounced project didn't work out and now there are legitimate redundancies in various departments that needed to be reconciled? Maybe there was a creative power struggle and the old guard lost, and it was seen as a good a time as any to do some union busting along the way? Maybe development on Dragon Age is going even more poorly than has been known (I mean, its director did leave in January which is also not a great sign), causing them to pull resources away from the new Mass Effect's preproduction and letting go of people who wouldn't easily find a position back on the Dragon Age team? Who knows - any of that (and much more) is possible. Saying anything about what's going on or what it means for Bioware's games is pure conjecture.
All we really know for sure is that these layoffs suck and reek of mismanagement, an idea which is bolstered by the titles they've released over the past 6+ years.
