What I don’t get is how do so many companies make the exact same mistake?

It’s like corporations all get the same memo and do the exact same things in lockstep

That's the funny point: it's not a mistake from their point of view. The managers deciding this get MASSIVE bonuses because they saved a lot of money, which means more money for the shareholders

EA has its money cows, and neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age are one of them, as it seems. The IP stays with EA anyway, so from their point nothing is really lost.

There are multiple causes. Two big ones are:

- Increasingly rapid proliferation of business strategy, competitive analysis and spreadsheet-driven financial optimization means more MBAs in a given industry trying to run similar playbooks at the same time. This increasing homogenization occurs at both the company level and the investor level.

- Corporate executives and managers can have divergent incentives due to differing scopes, time frames and reward structures. A crass example is "Even an obvious Ponzi scheme can be good as long as you personally get out before the inevitable crash", although the way it actually happens in practice is usually much more indirect.

For instance, even the difference between a manager optimizing for their division's end-of-year bonus can diverge from the CEO's incentive to optimize next year's profit margin increase. And those can both differ from an institutional investor's incentives tied to 5 yr stock price appreciation.