It's not necessarily that they even think people don't want it anymore, but they think that not enough people want it. And for their purposes, they're right. Larian is obviously making great profits off D:OS, but they're a 40-person company. EA has 10,000 employees, these kind of profits aren't worth their time. They're targetting the mass market, the unwashed masses (aka: console players). If you're looking for the D:OS kind of RPGs, there's no point in even paying attention to BioWare anymore.
EA may have 10,000 employees, but EA has never produced a single game that took 10,000 people to produce...;) Lol! If EA ever tried to put that many people on a game it would never get finished, and if it did get finished it would most likely be terrible...:D
The "mass market" is usually not what EA thinks it is, and that has been proven time and again. The great thing about software is that once you have assembled enough people to make a decent game, it really doesn't matter if you add 1,000 more or 10,000 more people--indeed, all that would do is serve to make things much, much worse.
EA executives have made comments in the recent past concerning consoles that are so stupid and so wrong it's difficult to believe the people who made those statements have jobs in the industry. They also fib quite vociferously when they want, such as the massive fibbing they did surrounding the release of SIM City.
If ever there is a company Larian should not emulate, it would be EA, imo.
Edit: wanted to add that I rather liked DA:O...thought it was very refreshing at the time, in fact. DAII looked and sounded so different and so poor that I never bought it and never will. I await DAIII with hope, but skepticism, nonetheless. If there's a way to mess up something, EA will find it and then spend $30M telling folks how wonderful it should have been....;)
Not smart--great games sell themselves, pretty much. "Too many Chiefs, too few Indians" is as true today as it ever was.
