Divinity Original Sin has been on the top sellers on Steam for over a month and the same goes for GOG.com but Bioware seems to think people don't want that anymore?
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 struggles to make profit at all. And that is because they aim each year for blockbusters. Some year they have enough successful blockbusters and in some others 2 million sales of their game was 'poor' sales and they have a net loss.
Literally nothing would stop EA to have a few small studios to publish some AA instead AAA games. They can be quite profitable as well, start franchises and are much less risky than taking 250 million dollars and trying to produce a blockbuster that must sale at least 5 million copies to be profitable. Everyone else is doing that anyway several times per year already, the competition on that market is hard too. ;-)
Well actually EA is doing a lot of AA games even, but they are nearly all licenced games and furthermore there seems to be no creative freedom involved for the studios that are contracted to develop them.
