Dragon Age Veteran Says EA Didn't Want to Appeal to RPG Fans

With a company like Electronic Arts, it's genuinely difficult to find something that makes people dislike them even more – everyone already hates EA – but every now and then, that "something" does surface. The latest stone thrown EA's way came from none other than David Gaider, a Dragon Age veteran with over 16 years at BioWare, who exposed just how badly Electronic Arts was taking its paying customers for granted.

In his interview with GamesRadar+, Gaider revealed that EA saw dedicated RPG fans as "the nerds in the cave" who "would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG." Because of this, the former Senior Writer explained, the studio felt no need to cater to that audience and instead focused on appealing to "the people who weren't in the cave," a much larger group Electronic Arts actually wanted to reach.

Timeline-wise, that outlook was likely common among EA executives around 2015-16, when Gaider left BioWare. He recalls that by then, his tastes were seen as somewhat "old-fashioned, slow, and cumbersome" by EA and belonged, you guessed it, "in the cave. Where nerds went. The nerds were in the cave." "I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanics," the writer says, "and that wasn't very welcome in the EA sphere."

With nearly ten years separating then and now, we have a perfect opportunity to look back and see the results of this mindset. The list of RPGs BioWare has produced over the past decade includes Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game so poorly received it became a meme and is widely believed to be the reason why an otherwise successful franchise was abandoned for such a long time; Anthem, which flopped financially and got deserted by EA two years after its launch; and, of course, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one of 2024's lowest-rated AAA games, whose failure triggered numerous layoffs within BioWare.

Right now, the studio is working on Mass Effect 5 – which remained in pre-production as of February 2025, four years after its announcement – and given the track record of disappointing titles, the quality of this next release is questionable to say the least. If the studio still believes RPG fans are "nerds in a cave" and doesn't feel the need to appeal to them, it's entirely possible the fourth consecutive flop is already in the works – just waiting to be shipped and become a laughingstock of the gaming community for a couple of months.

So, what do you think about Mass Effect 5? Do you think Electronic Arts has learned its lesson and will stop taking die-hard enthusiasts for granted, or will ME5 make The Veilguard look like a success story? Share your thoughts down in the comments below!

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