Editorial Rebuilding The Future: How BioWare Can Bounce Back

[LeStryfe79]

ME3 did not cost 10x as much as BG2. Do the fukkin' math and use logicalness. FFS

I bet it did if you count advertising.

 

[Volourn]

No.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

No.

Someone here claimed that a five million dollar budget was a bragging point for one of the original fallouts. That was what? Three years or so for each game?

Obsidian said that the studio was going through a million a month in development costs during the production of FNV and the...other ones.

 

[Volourn]

FO series is not BG series. Why bring up shit that has NOTHING to do with discussion. Still, even at low end of $5mil that would mean ME3 cost $50mil. That's bullshit.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Don't forget the $49mil cut that EA got.

 

[Volourn]

BIO and EA are not seperate companies. There is no 'cut'.

P.S. Your funy would have been funnier if they were, though.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Oh I meant to say I got a 49% cut of your RPG Codex posts the last 24hrs. My mistake, Volourn.

EDIT:

 

[Volourn]

Oh I meant to say I got a 49% cut of your RPG Codex posts the last 24hrs. My mistake, Volourn.

EDIT:

 

[Volourn]

Lookm at that! A Codexian tioolbag who spams nonsense and pretends to be knowledgeable but is nothing more than anignorafag.

L0L Madden is 'stagnant' with its millions sold. 2mil is a horrible number. Give me a break. Most games ar elucky to break 100k. The lucky few reach 500k. The fortunate minority get 1mil. FFFS

L0L Skyrim has sold 14 million copies. L0L

WTF is this bullshitz?

Do you know how many games have actually sold over 14mil copies let alone entire series? Come on. Don't be a fukkin' douchebag.


Internet. Home of Iidotz.

 

[IronicNeurotic]

Obsidian said that the studio was going through a million a month in development costs during the production of FNV and the...other ones.

Actually, that was the normal cost for running the entire studio. After the cancellation in march it's probably less. They had even more people during late NWN2/Sega phase so it was higher then.

One of the reasons they usually work on multiple projects at once.

 

[SCO]

He's not a kid. Volourn is actually 30+ years, practically a Methuselah of the bioware/blackisle/interplay/nma/mistresslair/rpgcodex/troika/etc net presence.

Horrible Volourn of Canada, beware his acid breath.

 

[Jaesun]

Newfags gonna newfag.

 

[SCO]

I'm not actually sure he's not 40+ too. It depends of when exactly he started hanging out on the interplay forums.

 

[Roguey]

Volourn is 35, he was born on December 27, 1976.

 

[waywardOne]

Ageism has no place here, not with all the other -isms taking up so much space.

 

[Volourn]

"Coming from you that is kind of ironic Volorun..but I´ll bite
I take it your experience with the capitalistic thought proceess (hell ANY thought process) might be a bit above you, but let me give itto you gently, if you are some small developer with a small workforce, small budgets and small or "niche" IP selling 500,000 copies mightbe a great success to you, hell maybe you just thought that selling 400,000 was sweet spot for having paid for the investment during the development....if any of this sounds too complicated to you I might try to explanin it with cookies and boyscouts
Ok but if you are basicaly the biggest videogame publisher on the freaking planet with over 100 hundred IP, with the highest sellling videogame franchise of all time and your sells are on the decline for the 3 consequetive year, to the point where your stock value went down by 50% last year because for them selling "just" 2 million copies when they had forseen at least twice that in various proyects. So if EA put 20 million in development of a game and they get back 30 million from sales the game was a failure to them and their investors.
I imagine that is a bit beyond your comprehension buddy and from what I have seen so far you are the resident imbecile who comes here to rant because probably nobody pays you any attenttion in RL....and if you dont believe Skyrim has sold 15 million copies do a little seraching before daring to get even near of those sticky keyboards and posting stupid IGNORANT shite
I´ll go easy on you this time because I can imagine you are some really fucked up kid, and I find your comments to be so retarded they are actually amusing"

You would have been better off just posting "I, Dumah, is an idiot' as you would have accomplished the same thing in less words than that bullshit spam you posted. :D

 

[evdk]

Volourn is 35, he was born on December 27, 1976.

So the mystery of Volly's codexian stalker is finally revealed?

 

[HobGoblin42]

Even today, I still wonder about the ridiculous price of $800mio USD that EA paid for Bioware/Pandemic back then. Pandemic has been closed and Bioware produced the biggest flop in the history of EA: SW-TOR. And the man who is responsible for all this (and who personally benefitted the most from this deal) is still in charge of that company that lost more than 70% of its value under his era.

And the next investment failure will be revealed soon: PopCap (price: $1 billion USD)

 

[Mother Russia]

Wyrmlord: You are a proven liar, and you prove it again with your latest shitposting in this thread.

Playing BG2 for the first time takes a long, long time. That's because you don't skip through the dialogue, you get defeated in battles and reload, one of your characters dies (permanently or heck even non permanently, as lugging everything in the characters inventory back to town for a ressurect was much more annoying and hard to do than simply reloading) doing every single quest and sub quest, talking to every npc, exploring every house, shop and map, etc etc

It is a CRPG after all, and not a FPS for the ADHD crowd who just want to blaze through everything gunz and spellz blazing.

 

[Darkforge]

Problem I have with "Volly" is he always seem's to spout of sales success and number's as if that somehow directly translated into Bioware having good games.
They do not. They have on rails, mind numbing interactive movies (without even a good story)

Pieces of digital shit, millions of idiots seem to adore....

 

[Volourn]

Look at that! Darkdork the Dunce is cryinga agin as he pretends his opinion on what makes a game good or bad is actually relevant! NEWSLFASH: IT ISN'T!

 

[tuluse]

Oh go get a room already!
Ok back on the subjetc, although the articule is well written and quite entertaining the fact of the matter is that is simply NOT how EA rolls; they buy companies to squeeze as much as they can out of their IP and they have been crashing and burning for the last 15 months with DA2, ME3 and TOR (which would have made 2 if not 3 wonderfull singleplayer games instead of 1 failed moneygrab MMO). Hell not even their Sports lineup can help them (Madden is stagnant, NCAA is worse every year, their NBA cant compete with 2K Sports etc) with Call of Duty running on fumes, Medal of Honor shunned by even their bought and paid reviewers, and their few publishing oportunities vanishing quicky they will need something to cash on quickly. Their fucking bride of frankenstein DA3 sounds more awful by the second...
EA will go on and just for the record, since Skyrim has sold over 14 million copies for EA selling "just" 2 million with DA2 was seen like a failure....
Biowere is DONE the people who made the company (the biodocs and its best designers and writers) so they have no chance in hell of righting the ship....it is just what EA does...
Oh all of this comes on top ofthe decline of the current consoles so even if the had an almost ready to ship new game they dont have much faith that w¿they will get a final big seller on the last legs of this console cycle

Call of Duty is Activision, they don't even make NBA Live anymore getting creamed by 2K so hard.

I'm curious to see what happens with the Battlefield franchise because they pissed off a lot of Battlefield 2 fans with 3, but I think Bad Company has done really well. Wouldn't be surprised to see them drop the main line in favor the console line.

 

[fanta]

Bioware produced the biggest flop in the history of EA

I find this sentence strangely soothing. God's in His heaven, all's right with the world!

 

[Volourn]

It wasn't true BIO. And, more importantly, I doubt it was EA's 'biggest flop'. EA has a long history and they've had some doozies.

 

[HobGoblin42]

It wasn't true BIO. And, more importantly, I doubt it was EA's 'biggest flop'. EA has a long history and they've had some doozies.

Mr. Industry Expert, SW-TOR was worse than Sims Online and I can't remember any bigger (product) flops than those two. But maybe you can enlighten me with your infinite wisdom about the industry I am working in for 18 years now (and about the entire universe if possible). The PopCap deal will surely top this, but that was an acquisition and not a single product.