Potential Amazon Mass Effect TV show

About 10.2m copies sold over the trilogy on X360, PS3 and PC. Obviously not including digital sales.

I actually can see this being awesome.

There's nothing to support the idea that ME secretly did way better because of digital. Prior to the LE, the most recent game was 2012. Digital sales were still in the gradually increasing phase from 2007 to 2012 when the games came out. And I haven't got figures to hand but last I heard in that era, PC was only like 30-40% of sales. ME1 was initially an Xbox 360 exclusive for goodness' sake. Let's not start rewriting history to make ME hugely successful at the time. Games just didn't sell that well digitally in that era.

It was incredibly critically successful. ME2 is staggeringly well-reviewed and ME1 and ME3 also did very well.

It was extremely popular with some people who did play it. It inspired the same kind of obsession as Star Trek and Star Wars. Hell its one of the very few things I'd consider myself an actual "fan" of.

But did it sell huge copies? No. It was reasonably successful, with each sequel being more successful. But EA didn't rate it that highly success-wise. They didn't push hard for more sequels and their choices suggest they saw it as a solid but unimportant IP.

Time and the Legendary Edition changed this all up a bit and the LE was far more successful than EA anticipated. Andromeda also sold well despite pretty bad reviews. It underperformed but not hugely and made a lot more than its dev cost back. So EA seem to have realised that ME is still extremely well-regarded, and a new ME game that didn't suck would probably sell crazy numbers. A TV show couldn't hurt that, I suspect.

He didn't write for ME, note. He's the Dragon Age guy and has made a couple of slightly condescending comments about MEs writing before.

Drew Karpyshyn who most people credit with an awful lot of what was good about ME had a very different reaction:

www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-11-26-ex-mass-effect-developers-express-interest-in-tv-show

As did Sam Hulick who did some good music for ME though really they need Jack Wall who did most of the best stuff.


EDIT:

Imogen at RPS makes a pretty good suggestion: www.rockpapershotgun.com/if-amazon-make-a-mass-effect-tv-show-liara-should-be-the-main-character

But I think realistically we'd be looking at an ensemble cast one way or another, with Liara no more the "main character" of the show than [insert Stark] is in GoT, or at most as "main" as James Holden is in the later seasons of The Expanse (i.e. he gets about 10-15% of screentime at most). It seems like most/all successful SF/fantasy series over the last couple of decades (or a bit less) have avoided having a "main character" too much.