Total Playtime: RIP Bioware

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.    

This week's episode is dedicated to a single bit of particularly crushing news: the demise of Bioware as part of EA's cost-cutting/the ongoing contraction of AAA game development. Nate's graphics card also died so he was unable to join us, but Alice, Brendy and myself gathered to say a few words about the departed, and quite a lot more about Alice's new drinking habit.

Plus: the art of finding suitably deranged people to write opinion columns, the complexity of squash, and what to do with 500 surplus missing-cat posters.

This website and its paying subscribers enables this podcast to exist and we thank them for it, along with Marsh Davies for our artwork, God Ribbon for our music and Alix Attenborough for our editing. You can share your memories and/or hating tips at totalplaytimepod@gmail.com, and rate us five stars (no other scores permitted) wherever you get your podcasts, it will help others find the show and by extension this website.

Links!
The EA buyout was heavily leveraged. Some people took out an ad in Times Square to support their petition. The woman giving $50,000 in a shoebox to a fake FBI agent is just one highlight of The Cut; you may also consider being humiliated by Prada. Please consider The Jankword.

Games!
Titles from ex-Bioware devs include Exodus, Eternal Strands, Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical and Mythforce. Set The Record Straight. Pool of Madness. Mosaic of the Strange (or 2025 Mosaic Retrospective if you want to feel sad). Brendy is playing free browser sci-fi game corru.observer.

Recommendations!
Jennifer Tolstoy's Pets of Desire, You be the judge: should my husband stop letting our cat drink on the kitchen counter? and Holy.