Interview An Honest Conversation With BioWare

[Occasionally Fatal]

Bitmob is terrible. :/

 

[Trash]

Westwood Studios, based in Las Vegas, currently has a five to six percent share of the PC game market. The company, and its 150 employees, will remain in Nevada. "We were courted by many companies, but in the end, we knew that EA would provide us with the best infrastructure and support that we need," said Sperry, Westwood's president and CEO.

It's like Groundhog Day it is. Same story since forever and still people think it will be different this time.

 

[zelda64whatagreatgame]

perhaps some dudes at the top of these companies wants to cash in and generally doesn't care that much what happens in the long run.

 

[Gragt]

One of the rare articles that has the courage to say out loud what others do not dare to admit. Give the man a Pullitzer.

 

[grdja]

perhaps some dudes at the top of these companies wants to cash in and generally doesn't care that much what happens in the long run.

Well that is how capitalism works. Ensured short term profit trumps all.

 

[felipepepe]

If you go into Arrival with low expectations, enjoy the shooting, and forget what it could've been, you'll have a pretty decent time.

I really feel sorry for him.

 

[deus101]

Failed Gonzo Journalism.

 

[villain of the story]

One of the rare articles that has the courage to say out loud what others do not dare to admit. Give the man a Pullitzer.

It's the ferrets, isn't it? They finally got to you. R.I.P.

 

[Drakron]

Dragon Age 2 is still a bunch of fun if you overlook the reused environments and potential they had to work with. Same goes for Arrival. If you go into Arrival with low expectations, enjoy the shooting, and forget what it could've been, you'll have a pretty decent time.

....

Well, nobody asked for my opinion, but here it is. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a senior designer at BioWare but I did not work on DA:O or DA2.

fake edit: so I basically just spent an hour writing a magnum opus defending DA2. I deleted it after reading it back to myself and seeing a long list of excuses. Bottom line is, the game had a one-year production cycle and no amount of clever development can disguise this fact.

I will say that I am in awe of what they did from a technical standpoint- I simply cannot fathom how they accomplished as much as they did with that deadline. Most dev cycles of a game this size take 4-5 years; DA:O took nearly 7. You also have to factor in that there was no recycling from the first game and between pre-production and the time it takes to QA and gold-push a game you can lose a few months. BioWare games can be even worse about this because of the unusual amount of story variables involved. In essence they produced the vast majority of DA2 in about eight months. loving amazing.

That said, BioWare stands in a tough position. Their highest rated game, Mass Effect 2, got a metacritic score of 96 which is almost impossibly high. That game barely cracked 2 million copies sold. Compare this to the XBOX-only sales of Fallout 3 (3.5 million), Oblivion (3.5 mil), Fable 2 (4 mil), Red Dead Redemption (4.2 mil), Assassin's Creed (5 mil), forget BLOPS (12 mil). Dragon Age sold roughly the same as Mass 2, and both games cost and took about the same amount of time to produce as anything else on this list. So you have to wonder, why are BioWare game selling so much less with such higher quality?

Anyway, I'll let you come to your own conclusions about the state of Dragon Age 2 which, incidentally, had almost exactly the same first-week sales as DA:O. I will say, however, that once I stopped punishing the game for the sins of its fathers I ended up really enjoying it.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... t389494745

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Dragon Age 2 is still a bunch of fun if you overlook the reused environments and potential they had to work with. Same goes for Arrival. If you go into Arrival with low expectations, enjoy the shooting, and forget what it could've been, you'll have a pretty decent time.

....

Well, nobody asked for my opinion, but here it is. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a senior designer at BioWare but I did not work on DA:O or DA2.

fake edit: so I basically just spent an hour writing a magnum opus defending DA2. I deleted it after reading it back to myself and seeing a long list of excuses. Bottom line is, the game had a one-year production cycle and no amount of clever development can disguise this fact.

I will say that I am in awe of what they did from a technical standpoint- I simply cannot fathom how they accomplished as much as they did with that deadline. Most dev cycles of a game this size take 4-5 years; DA:O took nearly 7. You also have to factor in that there was no recycling from the first game and between pre-production and the time it takes to QA and gold-push a game you can lose a few months. BioWare games can be even worse about this because of the unusual amount of story variables involved. In essence they produced the vast majority of DA2 in about eight months. loving amazing.

That said, BioWare stands in a tough position. Their highest rated game, Mass Effect 2, got a metacritic score of 96 which is almost impossibly high. That game barely cracked 2 million copies sold. Compare this to the XBOX-only sales of Fallout 3 (3.5 million), Oblivion (3.5 mil), Fable 2 (4 mil), Red Dead Redemption (4.2 mil), Assassin's Creed (5 mil), forget BLOPS (12 mil). Dragon Age sold roughly the same as Mass 2, and both games cost and took about the same amount of time to produce as anything else on this list. So you have to wonder, why are BioWare game selling so much less with such higher quality?

Anyway, I'll let you come to your own conclusions about the state of Dragon Age 2 which, incidentally, had almost exactly the same first-week sales as DA:O. I will say, however, that once I stopped punishing the game for the sins of its fathers I ended up really enjoying it.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... t389494745

 

[Azrael the cat]

perhaps some dudes at the top of these companies wants to cash in and generally doesn't care that much what happens in the long run.

On top of that, insofar as the seller's personal financial 'long run' is concerned, being bought out like that is the best move they can make. Lot's of IP/tech firms start up with AIMS of getting bought out by a larger company.

When they're selling a company that consists of nothing but IP and employment contracts (and soft IP at that - copyright, designs and goodwill - it's not like they're getting a 12 year patent to monopolise a new tech, or the ingredient recipe for cokacola) the purchase price is essentially factoring in that company's future profits for the mid-term. After all, that's what IP is - the financial value of exploiting an idea. The previous owner gets rich, and is in a powerful position to either invest his money in something else, or start a new studio if things don't work out where he is.

Either way, his money is no longer resting on how the company goes. If the company gets absorbed and all their IPs cancelled, and all the staff get laid off - that isn't his problem any more. That's the position the Biodocs are in, and it's why Garriot still got to go to space after Origin dissolved.

It's a big call NOT to sell out once you've got a good name and a large company interested. At that point, there's serious questions about how much larger your company can grow without running into distribution and infrastructure problems. Sure you're a great game developer, but that's no guarantee that you'll be great at managing a 1500 employee company, where you don't even get to do any game desigining yourself anymore because you're too busy running the damn business.

Bottom line is that most of the companies that EA bought really couldn't have grown much bigger than they were when they sold out. They had hit market dominance, lacked the interest and expertise to enter into different markets - sure, Bioware was already 'streamlining', but they weren't equipped to start up a CoD-clone division, and Westwood weren't going to start expanding far out of the RTS market. That means that even if they kept on making good profits, the actual values of the companies were at the maximum (if you were to adjust for inflation).

Now for the owner, the value of the company means much more than immediate profit. He NEEDS the profit to keep things going, but being profitable now doesn't mean he'll be rich in 10 years. Most of that profit is going to go on keeping the place running - HE isn't necessarily seeing that big a chunk of it. When he sells, he gets the LOT. So the boss gets rich - likely he's become richer than he could have been if he stayed on owning the place and making profitable games for his whole career (unless he was to sell anyway, later on, for a similar amount). And he gets to take his money and put it into safe investments. He's probably making as almost as much yearly income from his new investment portfolio than he was from his old company, AND he gets a new job as a high-up in EA that pays him more than he used to pay himself, because when he owned the place he was putting all the profits back into the business to compete against larger companies like EA. He is fucking set like he could never have been otherwise.

Keep that in mind when these guys sell. It can be a terrible choice for the gamers and for their employees. But it's almost never a bad choice for them.

 

[J1M]

Parent companies don't need to rape and pillage to be profitable. Look at Blizzard or outside of the games industry.

 

[Excidium]

Parent companies don't need to rape and pillage to be profitable. Look at Blizzard.

 

[serch]

Well, nobody asked for my opinion, but here it is. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a senior designer at BioWare but I did not work on DA:O or DA2.

fake edit: so I basically just spent an hour writing a magnum opus defending DA2. I deleted it after reading it back to myself and seeing a long list of excuses. Bottom line is, the game had a one-year production cycle and no amount of clever development can disguise this fact.

I will say that I am in awe of what they did from a technical standpoint- I simply cannot fathom how they accomplished as much as they did with that deadline. Most dev cycles of a game this size take 4-5 years; DA:O took nearly 7. You also have to factor in that there was no recycling from the first game and between pre-production and the time it takes to QA and gold-push a game you can lose a few months. BioWare games can be even worse about this because of the unusual amount of story variables involved. In essence they produced the vast majority of DA2 in about eight months. loving amazing.

That said, BioWare stands in a tough position. Their highest rated game, Mass Effect 2, got a metacritic score of 96 which is almost impossibly high. That game barely cracked 2 million copies sold. Compare this to the XBOX-only sales of Fallout 3 (3.5 million), Oblivion (3.5 mil), Fable 2 (4 mil), Red Dead Redemption (4.2 mil), Assassin's Creed (5 mil), forget BLOPS (12 mil). Dragon Age sold roughly the same as Mass 2, and both games cost and took about the same amount of time to produce as anything else on this list. So you have to wonder, why are BioWare game selling so much less with such higher quality?

Anyway, I'll let you come to your own conclusions about the state of Dragon Age 2 which, incidentally, had almost exactly the same first-week sales as DA:O. I will say, however, that once I stopped punishing the game for the sins of its fathers I ended up really enjoying it.

Fake, ME2 sold 2 millions the first week.

 

[Brother None]

Fake, ME2 sold 2 millions the first week.

Shipped 2 million. Way to fall for BioWare's tricks, serch.

 

[serch]

Could be, but the numbers reported for Oblivion were far worse and I suppose they were also shipped units. If you have more reliable numbers be my guest.

 

[Brother None]

Could be, but the numbers reported for Oblivion were far worse and I suppose they were also shipped units. If you have more reliable numbers be my guest.

Man fuck if I know. I'm just saying, it can't be dismissed as fake based on just that. It's a bit of a suspect post but developers post way too much stuff on SA anyway for some reason.

Besides, if he has numbers from other developers they're either from PR or, more likely, NPD. Which is cute and all but hardly accurate.

 

[treave]

Their highest rated game, Mass Effect 2, got a metacritic score of 96 which is almost impossibly high. That game barely cracked 2 million copies sold. Compare this to the XBOX-only sales of Fallout 3 (3.5 million), Oblivion (3.5 mil), Fable 2 (4 mil), Red Dead Redemption (4.2 mil), Assassin's Creed (5 mil), forget BLOPS (12 mil). Dragon Age sold roughly the same as Mass 2, and both games cost and took about the same amount of time to produce as anything else on this list. So you have to wonder, why are BioWare game selling so much less with such higher quality?

Different fanbase, different fucking genre, duh? Isn't it a given that FPS/action games have always sold more than RPGs? If they wanted to get the CoD fanbase they need to add quite a bit more epic Michael Bay setpieces into their Mass Effect. They can only reasonably compare their games to Fallout 3 and Oblivion on that list, and a difference of about a million they can explain away by Bethesda having a more competent marketing team (Pete Hines). But hey, good to know that Bioware are clear about their intent to capture the console actioner crowd.

Yeah, the difference is that even when Obsidian is given a restrictively small development window and have to rush something out the door, what's left and the glimmer of what's hinted at is amazing, and still ties together thematically and hits most all the right notes (KOTOR 2). When Bioware does it you get tedious fetch quests to the same identical cave, a story that was flaunted as taking place over a decade even though the NPCs all stay the same and nothing ever really changes whatsoever, and the barest hint of what the plot's even supposed to be.

Obsidian faggotry isn't limited to just the Dex.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Could be, but the numbers reported for Oblivion were far worse and I suppose they were also shipped units. If you have more reliable numbers be my guest.

Not sure how reliable this link is, but it claims that Oblivion sold over 3 mil back in 2007.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Gears- ... -2439.html

 

[Phelot]

All these companies that get bought by EA... I feel bad for them because I suspect that they do want to remain independent, but from what I heard, it was pretty shitty working at them, always needing every game to be a killer success, never any room for failure, the horrible hours, the hard work. Then suddenly some giant comes in talking about all this money and I can see how tempting it would be, but I guess the sad truth always come afterward.

 

[Falkner]

Didn't they say that they started with DA 2 during the development of DA:O? When they optimized DAO for the consoles?
So that would make a development cycle of about 2 years. It's not terribly much, but certainly enough to make a sequel. Time is no excuse.

 

[J1M]

Parent companies don't need to rape and pillage to be profitable. Look at Blizzard.

Are you seriously suggesting that Blizzard went into the shitter in 1994? That's when they were purchased by a parent company, moron.

 

[attackfighter]

Parent companies don't need to rape and pillage to be profitable. Look at Blizzard.

Are you seriously suggesting that Blizzard went into the shitter in 1994? That's when they were purchased by a parent company, moron.

Blizzard's not your typical dev though, they really got lucky with WoW.

Without WoW they wouldn't be too different from Bioware.

 

[waywardOne]

why are BioWare game selling so much less with such higher quality?

 

[zelda64whatagreatgame]

Parent companies don't need to rape and pillage to be profitable. Look at Blizzard or outside of the games industry.

I don't think he's disputing that, but rather describing a common situation that some game companies find themselves in.