The writing has been on the wall for a long, long while now. Truth is, Bioware's been fucking up well before Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda. Take a stroll with me down memory lane, all the way to the 2010s. The Nintendo Wii is dominating the console market, Sony released their first portable console, but more to the point, Mass Effect 2 was released.

And Mass Effect 2 had DLCs. A lot of them. Some were included with specific versions of the game, some were sold separetely. Pretty standard practice, at least at the time. What was decidedly non-standard and also needlessly complicated and infuriating is that a good chunk of those DLCs were only available through Bioware's own Cerberus Network store. You couldn't even buy them directly from EA Origin, which was the official store of Bioware's own publisher! And forget Steam. No, you had to use Bioware's super special store. And I just want to stress, this was their idea. Bioware's. Not anyone else's.

So, fine, you might be thinking, you just needed to load up the store and buy the DLC, right? And yes, you would be partly correct. But you didn't pay with regular money, oh no. Before you could actually buy the DLC, you had to convert your regular pleb money to Bioware bucks or whatever their fake money was called. Then and only then could you buy the DLCs for the game. And just to pour salt in the wound, they were never on sale. Not their coins, not the DLCs themselves. Full price the whole time.

This was rectified just a short 11 years later with Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which already includes all the DLCs and mercifully, removed the Cerberus Network store completely. Of course, Bioware was already in freefall when this was released, chiefly due to Anthem and ME: Andromeda flopping hard, but hey. Better late than never.