Editorial Rebuilding The Future: How BioWare Can Bounce Back

[VentilatorOfDoom]

nobody posted the "volourn posting logic"-image yet?

 

[evdk]

Does it involve broken clocks?

 

[catfood]

Does anyone still have that image with the orange Cadillac with a maple leaf on it and a caption saying "Roofles! What the fuck am I talking about?"?

 

[SCO]

nobody posted the "volourn posting logic"-image yet?

Here, let me plagiarize the greats:

"t won't matter, as like all Bioware games, no matter what you do, they lead to the same thing."

Flat out lie.

Hyperbole, maybe, but hardly a lie.

You're such a master of rhetoric Volourn. I can see you in a roman forum, with your eagle charisma, godlike stature, all subtle and well defined irony, calling out the lesser man, the one with mediocre education and culture - FLAT OUT LIE ROOFLES!

 

[Tel Prydain]

I like Volly - he always brings the good times.

Speaking of the old interplay forums, whatever happened to that dude that always talked like an orc?

 

[Stinger]

Ha! Good fun!

 

[DemonKing]

Gromnir was the orc guy from memory...I think he had a cameo in the BG2 expansion but I haven't read any posts from him for years.

This quote from the article amused me:

Whether fair or not, it cannot be denied that BioWare now suffers from the perception that it no longer values its fans as members of the community it deliberately cultivated for years, but as mere customers, from whom no disagreement or dissatisfaction can be expressed.

I stopped visiting the Bio forums ages before they sold out to EA because even then Mods were deleting anything even vaguely critical of their titles. Apparently it has gotten so bad now that the diehard fanboys who never posted anything critical about Bio until DA2 and ME3 compelled them to are beginning to notice...

 

[Jaesun]

No you remember wrong. Gromnir is the Tarrasque that you find in the Oasis in BG2.

 

[Average Manatee]

Just found this thread. Apologies if this has already been done:

The corpse EA is fucking just went limp. Here's how to make it feel like it's alive once again.

 

[Dexter]

"Volourn, do you need help having your prescriptions refilled?"

The only prescription I 'need' is for people to take truth pills and be honest and not post bullshit.


"You don't take into account that for a publisher like EA, selling 2 million from game with a monster PR campaign is a failure. That's why DA2 is a faillure. But I don't see how ME3 bombed. The game is a pile of shit, but unfortunatley it sold very good."

DA2 was made in just over a year on an already made engine with no licensing fees need and sold 2mil+ copies in less than a month. It's also getting a sequel. That's a fukkin' success.

Enjoy your TOEE, BL, and Arcanum Troika Part 1 developed sequels. LMFAO

Mass Effect 2:
Platform X360
Global 2.93m
Platform PS3
Global 1.20m

Mass Effect 3:
Platform X360
Global 2.50m
Platform PS3
Global 0.96m

 

[Average Manatee]

So basically that chart proves that $1000 spent on strippers for "reviewers" is worth ~400k sales at the least. Very nice ROI.

 

[Volourn]

"even then Mods were deleting anything even vaguely critical of their titles."

Flat out lie.


Dexcter, your bullshit source sprove shit but that they are bullshit sources.

 

[DemonKing]

"even then Mods were deleting anything even vaguely critical of their titles."
Flat out lie.

Well if it wasn't true Magical Volo then I must be going senile, because I distinctly remember leaving in a huff for that reason.

Gromnir is the Tarrasque that you find in the Oasis in BG2.

Now - THAT is a lie.

 

[Volourn]

"Well if it wasn't true Magical Volo then I must be going senile, because I distinctly remember leaving in a huff for that reason."

Plenty of peoplem criticzed BIo without being banned. Grom himself criticized them. FFS, I criticized them and BIO loathes me yet I was not banned for criticizing them. FFS


Tons of people have criticized them on their forums and are not warned ever let alone banned.

 

[Volourn]

I've been banned at both BIO and Codex.. I didn't slit my wrists yet they both begged me to return. Only cowards commit suicide and I am many awful things but a coward is not one of them!

 

[Marquis de Retardot]

"even then Mods were deleting anything even vaguely critical of their titles."

Flat out lie.

Nope! He's right -- it's the troof! I left for the very same reason. However those forums were still infinitely better than Bioretard social network they have de-evolved into.

 

[Wyrmlord]

As someone who posted in the pre-BSN BioWare forums, I felt that criticism of BioWare was more than welcome. But the response (especially from James Henley) was, "Maybe you should consider it's not the developer, but the people who buy our games." Some of them were pretty honest in admitting that they cut down their standards to pander to pedestrian tastes, as controversial the suggestion seems.

A lot of boldness from both sides is what I recall from BioWare forums.

That may not be the same Bioboards you guys remember, and maybe we all just remember differently?

 

[sser]

I still think BioWare is gonna get cleaned out, have its outer shell used for marketing, and then possibly get the Westwood final treatment. Seen it coming since I read how much EA was investing in what was obviously going to be a failure in SWTOR. The two doctors are already gone.

 

[waywardOne]

Nah, you have it, at least for the boards prior to '07. Nothing was universally praised. I wasn't the lone asshole in the dark when I criticized or complained, but I was certainly outnumbered. BW's sacred cows didn't exist because "the fans" really were as much a part of the discussion as the devs instead of mere customers to be pandered to.

 

[Tel Prydain]

Gromnir - riiiiiiiight. He popped up in BG2:ToB...

Cheers DemonKing

 

[ravenshrike]

TOR was so profitable they had to shut down almost all its servers and restructure it as a free to play game in hopes of salvaging something from the mess. How long did they have to keep the 500k subscribers for to be profitable against their fixed costs? Or do you suppose that they would have been profitable on 500k box sales who all quit at the end of their free month? Do they need 500k subscribers simply to pay their maintenance staff and bandwidth costs, etc?

IIRC the back of the envelope calculations on the forums were 6 months to a year to cover development, than another 6 months to begin running profitably. That depends on the nature of the licensing agreement of course.

 

[Moribund]

It was a year with a million subscribers. But they got nothing in subscription fees for people who drop out before the free time was up, which probably meant almost everyone. So if they got 120 million in subscriptions they''d break even. Ehehehe, probably got 2% of that.

 

[waywardOne]

Don't forget. A lot of these people who somehow have incomes don't have anything else to spend their money on besides Twilight paraphrenalia and Appleby's night with their theater club. For them, (shitty) MMOs is the same as a normal person's season tickets to a regional sports team, or music/concert budget, or satellite TV subscription.

 

[Azrael the cat]

TOR was so profitable they had to shut down almost all its servers and restructure it as a free to play game in hopes of salvaging something from the mess. How long did they have to keep the 500k subscribers for to be profitable against their fixed costs? Or do you suppose that they would have been profitable on 500k box sales who all quit at the end of their free month? Do they need 500k subscribers simply to pay their maintenance staff and bandwidth costs, etc?

IIRC the back of the envelope calculations on the forums were 6 months to a year to cover development, than another 6 months to begin running profitably. That depends on the nature of the licensing agreement of course.

Man that's some crazy lack of budgeting sense on EA/ex-Mythic/Bioware's behalf. WoW hit profit on early box sales alone - sure, they might have been bigger sales, but not by the kind of degree that explains the distinction between subscriptions being gravy and needing to maintain high subscriptions for 18 months just to hit paydirt. And Blizzard didn't have Blizzard to copy from - sure, they took Everquest's general model, but everything else that's been standard about MMORPGs since then was pretty much designed on box sale budget. Which shouldn't be unremarkable - after all, why should elements like interface and quest design (as opposed to the online infrastructure, which one would expect to scale with the number of subscribers anyway) be significantly more costly to do than a single player game?

It's less a story of Blizzard being efficient when making WoW, and more one of 'holy shit, how arrogant must EA/Bioware have been to throw that kind of money at TOR'.

 

[Average Manatee]

As far as the executive level of the company is concerned MMOs need to go big or go home. An MMO that does only mediocre is a waste, because MMOs are by default the end of the series. TOR with 500,000 subscribers would be a failure no matter how much was spent on development because the mere existence of TOR has the opportunity cost of eliminating the possibility of selling KOTOR 3, its DLC, and its sequels every year or two years.

And as far as EA management could predict, TOR SHOULD have gotten those numbers. They see:

WoW was successful because it was made by an acclaimed 10/10 AAA developer. As far as the industry is concerned, Bioware is/was a similar tier developer.
WoW was successful because it was based on a tremendously popular series with a huge fan base. Star Wars/Kotor is similar.
WoW was successful because it was huge. TOR needs to be huge, even huger to compete with WoW + expansions.

What drug everything down in the end:

WoW was successful because it tried something new. TOR tried to be WoW with full voice acting? Who cares?
WoW was successful because Blizzard had a great reputation. Bioware released DA2 and ME3. Nuff said.
WoW was successful because Blizzard actually had a history of designing gameplay worth a crap. Has any Bioware game had good gameplay? BG2 is kind of close, but that was a long time ago.