It’s official. EA Milking Bioware/Pandemic for all it’s worth.

Yesterday, January 07th, 2008, Marked teh official date that EA takes full control over Bioware/Pandemic Studios. So, what is the first thing they announce? 10 NEW FRANCHISES from the teams. That’s not typo, 10 damn franchises. Now for a company like Square-Enix or Ubisoft, this would seem normal. However, for a company like Bioware who releases one game every 4 freakign years, or Pandemic which is about the same, this is pretty shocking.

Heres the word from Joystiq:

While we remain cynical of the whole affair – it is, after all, what we
do – EA has announced that the pair has been tapped to create a
whopping ten new franchises for EA, based on six different
"wholly-owned" properties. 10? Seriously? BioWare alone hasn’t touched
that much code in nearly a decade, though to be fair EA hasn’t laid out
a time line for how often these games will emerge.

EA has confirmed that BioWare remains hard at work on Dragon Age and
the DS Sonic RPG, while Pandemic is chugging along developing
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and Saboteur.

This is a bad trend for gaming. I hope we won’t start to see great developers turning out rushed products every year. We can only hope that EA won’t rush the, and that these 10 franchises come out over the span of…let’s say 20 years.