Peter Mandelson, the oleaginous right-hand of Tony Blair's Labour Party in the late '90s, once remarked to a colleague that the party had no need to focus on its traditional voter base, and could safely dedicate itself to chasing more affluent, middle-class, conservative voters. After all, said Mandelson, its base had "nowhere else to go". Don't worry, I promise we'll get to Dragon Age.
14 years of Conservative Party rule later and you might think that kind of reasoning has been proven bankrupt, but only if you underestimate the powerful minds of the world's corporate executive class. It's not quite as consequential as the direction of British politics, but it turns out that EA had its own version of that thought process when it came to running BioWare in the 2010s: a notion that RPG fans would gobble up whatever you chucked their way so long as you could plausibly call it an RPG. Instead, they thought, BioWare should focus on making games that appeal to people who don't usually play RPGs.
