beaver pelting?
WAIT - they PAY you to pelt beavers in Canada???? Call the chamber of commerce, cause I'm about to undercut the market. My team and I will 'pelt' any beaver you want to present (though I'll be angry if turns out to be one of thoe fictitious mammals with large teeth that gnaw wood, although so long as we get a surchage I won't rule it out just yet). For customers who want female-only attention to their beaver I think I could even scrounge up some beaver-pelting-ladies I know. Why get some amateur to pelt beavers for free, when our true professionals armed with our Nerdob-Presentation-Maturak-E-JackYOU-Lation (or short, nerd PreMatureEjaculation) gets the job done quickly each time.
...but on a less Retardoland note, there's no sense in berating someone for going allout for a Bioware job just because we personally don't like some of their games. If they're serious about wanting game-creation to be their career, then it is an obvious and extremely important goal. I love and support indie developers, but running that kind of small business is not for everyone. There's a hell of a difference between being an indie developer that codes in his spare time, but has some other lucrative dayjob that pays the bills (and which prevents you from being fulltime dedicated to your product), and actually trying to make a living and pay the mortgage/rent, while keeping kids in school etc all through your tiny gaming studio. Many - I'd say MOST - people do not have their mental toughness, the financial capacity, the lack of responsibilities such as kids, the willpower and the work effort to run a PROFESSIONAL FULL-TIME indie development company.
- Analogy time- there are many professions and jobs where, frankly, graduates get zero choice about where they can get their first job. That certainly was the case with my first professional job. We have a glut of law grads in Australia - there are 4 times as many law students as there are lawyers (cause every blockhead uni administration wants to start up a fricken law school 'for the prestige' and because idiot kids and their parents think that being a lawyer is a icence to print money, when in reality it is low employment in the early years and never makes the kind of money that engineers do), and in WA only 1/3 of law students actually manage to get employed as lawyers upon graduating. So you just take whatever job you can get post graduation, and be darn glad that you didn't miss out. So it is often a matter of necessity for the left-wing civil libertarian legal activist to spend their first few years working for a big 'evil' commercial litigation firm, whilst the guy that WANTS to work for the big commercial firm starts out working for some government-funded anti-discrimination centre. No-one looks down on either, that's just the truth of the market. The reason why I bring this up is because from what I've read (and I've never worked in game development, so I could be COMPLETELY wrong) their employment market works in exactly the same way. You get a job ANYWHERE and are darn grateful for it, and then in 4 or 5 yeras, once you've got enough experience to be genuinely valuable, THEN you leave and get a job with the company that you WANT to work for.
- even if your dream is to make pure game-as-art classics, or you want to be a niche developer to a small but loyal and lovable set of fans, working at Bioware, and learning to make games for the mainstream in a polished professional setting seems like rather good training to me.