serch said:
Yeah, probably the game will make a profit but I think that the concept 'Dragon Age' is worth less today than it dit before DA2, so it's like when you sacrifice some of your assets to balance a bad year, you won't be able to do it again.
The value of the Bioware brand is far more important than the Dragon Age IP. Bioware is one of very few studios that can authentically claim that the majority of its fanbase are fans of the company, rather than IPs held by the company. People think of KoTOR, DA, ME as different versions of the product 'a Bioware rpg', and that's a good thing for the company. It means that every time they release a new IP, they get to take a very large chunk of those fans over to the new IP, potentially making it profitable on pre-orders alone.
Now the downside for 'creative' industries is measuring the value of what they have. When EA bought Bioware, what did they actually get? A collection of IPs? Alright, so they get a set of product names - but what's that worth? This isn't CoD-style covershooters where you can just get another team to come in and make the same product - if EA slapped 'Baldurs Gate 3' or 'KoTOR 3' on a game made by a completely unrelated studio, it would flop hard. Conversely, Bioware could take up an entirely new product name and their fans would cross over to it, just as if it were a continuation of their old IP.
So product names aren't worth 'that' much. What's left - ideas. Ok, that is actually worth something. But I'm not convinced that Bioware's settings are so unique that EA have purchased anything significant here - they're just generic sets of 'rpg-ideas'. Their mechanics aren't unique enough to 'own', and their settings are just stock space opera and stock fantasy - really really difficult areas to claim ownership of. You could map the entire political setting from Dragon Age onto a different fantasy world, give the races different names and marginally different histories, and it would be enough to avoid a lawsuit, simply because there are so many IPs out there using similar ideas that it's near impossible to match a particular setting element to a particular owner.
Moreover, the setting still doesn't define the 'Bioware rpg'. Look how they strung their 'get the 4 star maps' game design over several different settings and storylines. I'm not saying that they could keep doing that same design, but it shows how the Bioware studio could theoretically sell all of their IP and still make very very similar crpgs under different IPs, while the purchaser of their IPs might not be capable of continuing them in a way that will attract the fanbase.
After that you've got the staff contracts. All of which rely on the goodwill of the individual staff to stay with you. Presumably there's also an exclusion clause whereby the Bioware docs can't go into competition against EA for 5-10 years, to stop them from selling the studio then immediately quitting their EA jobs and starting up BioWhere Studios and taking their fanbase with them, leaving the docs as incredibly incredbily wealthy, and EA holding a bunch of useless IPs. But the rest of staff aren't similarly bound, and exclusion clauses are only upheld if they have reasonably short reach or duration, which means that the Bioware docs could certainly at some point quit and start a new studio, having already become massively wealthy from the sale to EA.
So what does this mean? Firstly, the Bioware docs have made their money. They purchase sum includes the value of Bioware taking into account profits into the short-term future. They're incredibly rich, are no longer risking their personal fortunes on the success of their products, and are set up regardless of how Bioware goes. In fact, there's a good argument that they'd BENEFIT from Bioware tanking, as they've taken their wealth already, and if EA closed the studio they could just start a new studio with their existing fanbase (many of whom will simply say 'yeah, their last few games sucked, but only because of EA - the new studio will rock'). They could even still advertise themselves as 'from the producers of KotoR/ME/etc', so long as they're referring to their personal working history rather than implying corporate ownership. Or they could just move to other jobs within EA.
But what does it mean for the impact of a game like DA2 that is profitable on initial sales, but runs from mediocre to tanking in public opinion, relative to Bioware's usual 'can-do-no-wrong' reputation? It means that the value of the 'Bioware brand' drops substantially. And when you get down to it, that 'Bioware brand' is the only piece of property that the studio has that means anything. It isn't the docs problem anymore, but it means that the value of the Bioware studio has taken a sizeable hit. Of course, the nature of such intangible property is that one good hit could cause it to rebound right back up. But it doesn't change the fact that Laidlaw and co will be seen to have temporarily caused a significant drop in the studio's value, and that a lot rides on the quality of their next couple of games.
, DA2 doesn't.
