Intellectual Property.

That could change. EA is barely 1 step away from being the gaming industry's equivalent of a Private Equity firm itself. It's less of a publisher and more of a vulture that runs promising companies into the ground for profit. The old crew is still around. I understand a lot work for Archetype Entertainment now under Wizards of the Coast. Would they be willing to come home under new management? It's worth asking.

Also, which devs?

Just about anyone who worked at Bioware during the golden era has long since moved on and gotten other work, so who would get the IP? Just a studio made up of whichever random people happened to be left when it shut down? If that's the case, I don't think that will accomplish anything because the last several Bioware games sucked and nobody liked them, which is a big part of why they're being shut down in the first place.

If the goal is to get Mass Effect back on track, I think it'd be much more effective to sell the IP to a good studio that knows what to do with it, rather than just give it back to the existing devs so they can take 8 years to make a new game that has a good chance to bomb anyway.

And all that's assuming that EA is even willing to part with the IP anyway. For all we know they might just want to sit on it forever/hand it off to one of their other internal studios, in which case that's the end of that.

The problem is it's not a private equity firm incorporated Canada. Like most things, a lot of the private owners of Canadian businesses, are American. We do the the work, they make the profits. We want to tax them? They'll just shut down all their Canadian "investments." Until we get it through our thick skulls we don't need a rich American to own us and can run a company just fine without them, carefully leveraging crown corps as a public investment vehicle until a company can stand on its own legs and be privatized is a useful way to disentangle us from our current status as a resource colony for other countries.

"Private equity" isn't a monolithic structure that can be easily defined. It's just private companies with an exotic corporate structure. You can't really target them because you will target other private businesses in the process. What you can do is regulate their behavior so that a lot of their financial schemes are no longer profitable. Like, you shouldn't be able to buy a hospital and then create a shell company to lease it back to itself while investors pocket the rent. PE finds creative ways to stiff banks and consumers with financial engineering and that's what needs to be addressed.

The NDP aren't the government and never have been.

"Politicians" aren't one hive mind. I assure you that this particular politician certainly does not see REITs as a sacred cow.

This is the NDP, our lefty party, it most definitely isn't for them either.

Uhh the opposite actually. BioWare used to make a ton of games. For the last decade, they've made just a few games. They did better when they had a game out every 1-2 years rather than 4-5.

It's both. EA was always a parasitic company, but PE accelerated the extraction of value by saddling it with an unsustainable amount of debt. It's a zombie company now.

And it's not just EA; even the smaller shops are following suit.

TBF, an employee-owned rebirth might be the true path out of this. But the Federal support is going to need to be strong enough to either let them create an internal publisher or put in enough breaks that a publisher will be happy to take them on.

Yep. They're just leveraging the newest boogyman for more bullshit. Same as it ever was.