BioWare Developmental Director Explains Relationship With EA, Fans

So in other words we can blame Bioware and not EA for all the DLC for games like ME3? Still its an interesting insight into the EA/Bioware thing.

Ok Blizzard successful – Valve successful–

Bioware – > Dragon age 2 fail. Swtor fail. MAss effect 3 fail

SO MAKE MONEY by not screwing your customers?

At least Blizz and Valve try to make games that dont piss on their fans.

SWTOR – put out end content…
Mass effect 3 – MAKE A NEW ENDING  dont tell the fans “WE HAVE VISION SCREW YOU”

how about that?

So hands-off is total control over their budget and demanding x% return on investment? That sounds more like Vinny the Neighborhood Loan Shark’s idea of hands-off business management.

rEAper .

Bioware made the game, so I give them my “hate”.  Plenty of other companies work on deadlines and still manage to make good games.  No company wants a game in development for 10 years, by the time it’s released it will have outdated features for starters.  That means a LOT more time and money going in to a game with not only diminished returns but also a larger risk.  The same development cycles that Bioware had BEFORE EA are pretty much the same ones they are using in terms of time.  Take DA2 for example, copy and paste everywhere and a dumbed down world and story.  Where did the development cycle go?  The game was mediocre in almost every way.  Most of the characters in it were pretty bland and unexciting.  Mass Effect 3, that got more love and even then the ending was horrid and inconsistent.  SWTOR, my lord, most of the development time on that door-stop was spent adding voice over because after so many years of development, I can’t comprehend how they managed to make such a linear game with such uninteresting characters and story and ZERO endgame.  The time they have to develop their games isn’t the issue, it’s what they choose to focus on that they fail.  I still think back and remember the employee that quit from SWTOR because he said that the game was pointless, the only thing they had to be proud of was voice over. 

I think the issue with the money is the amount of money. Sure a company may invest a huge amount of money and expect an epic return, but that’s rarely the case. The main issue for developers is time. Look at games large games like EVE, or small time games like Dust, or Path of Exile. These games are incredible, free form representations of what the video game industry should be, and the majority of them are developed by some companies, on their own dime, without funding from some huge conglomerate. The joint reason here is that, sure there’s no backer giving them money, but there’s also no backer sucking them into a contract that pushes a game out before it should be.
There are cases in which publishers might not push games out before they’re due (Anet-NCSoft), and there are some cases in which that does occur (Activision-Blizzard, EA-Bioware). It’s really a crap shoot.

The saddest thing is that the games with the big names, and the big backers, and the big development teams, are often the worst of the worst, hold back the video game industry, yet do the best, while the indie/smalltime companies make incredible games and get over shadowed.

Keiken says that Valve and Blizzard have backers and that is why they are successful? Valve is Valve. They have no backer. they kicked Vivendi to the curb w/ HL2, and they are one of the few developers I still have respect for.

Blizzard? Blizzard made the entire Warcraft series on their own, and then made it big with WoW. Activision noticed and BAM bought a controlling stake. Now blizzard makes terrible games, and tries to sue good devs over what they think is their IP (dota).

Bioware could have made big bucks on their own with ME1-3 and SWTOR… Sure they might not have had hollywood actors do voices in SWTOR or the ME franchise, but if they spent the extra time on story, engine, gameplay, and immersion, that shouldn’t had made the difference.

I guess my point is, fuck EA, fuck Vivendi, fuck Acti, and fuck Blizzard.

SMILES!

Still, despite the endless discussion about ME3 ending sucks and so on, it would seem that a lot of people complained about it, therefor bought the game (one would hope). Yet if a company like bioware is not succesfull, you wonder how crappily the profits in a whole lot of other companies must be.

There is so little insight in most of the comments here it’s almost heartbraking. Not to mention that by the looks of the comments, some of the people didn’t even read the article. It’s ok to have an opinion guys, but get informed first and for the love of god learn what logic and perspective are. Most of you lack it completely.

You don’t have to be multimillion dollar company to be successful. I would say bioware is pretty successful even with flop of ME3 ending/ToR. But then again, I don’t consider ToR to be failure.