EA to purchase BioWare
While my friend Myles assures me, via his contacts within BioWare, that this is a good thing, I for one look upon the pending purchase of BioWare/Pandemic by Electronic Arts as a death-knell for a promising studio.
I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, of course…but EA’s track record of turning effective companies into wrecks and producers of poorly-executed, buggy, narratively weak games has been pretty consistent since the days of Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Electronic Arts Inc., the video game developer known for titles such as “Madden NFL” and “The Sims,” said Thursday it will acquire two software studios from Elevation Partners in a deal worth up to US$860 million.
The studios, BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios, have a total of 10 games under development. Elevation owns their parent, VG Holding Corp.
Together, the studios employ about 800 people in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, as well as in Canada and Australia.
I guess we’ll see if Dragon Age gets rushed out the door now, or (worse) cancelled.
You can read the official press release from BioWare here.
Update: Further thought…
Ugh, EA. Perhaps one of the worse choices for Elevation Partners to sell their investment too. Money-grubbing scum. I fear for DragonAge’s chances now…
Yeah.
I could start citing examples, but I have to be at a Scout camp in half an hour, and wouldn’t want to be late.
As I note in the above, my friend Myles — who has several contacts at BioWare — has said that on the whole, the employees of the company have a positive air about the deal, so I’m willing to concede the existence of at least a glimmer of hope. I guess it depends on how much development autonomy BioWare is being given.
The thing I don’t get is that EA has a pretty rigid policy concerning game development — titles have to have a 12-to-18 month development window, and that’s about it. For things like sports games, that works well enough.
BioWare, though, has a history of taking three to five years to develop titles fully (they’ve been working on Mass Effect since…what…2002? 2003?), and I wonder how that’s going to fit in with EA’s corporate culture.
Guess we’ll see.
Answer: it won’t.
Unless EA is prepared to throw lots of cash at BiowarePandemic’s way, and/or exhibit a lot more patience than they’ve shown before, things are going to get ugly.
Remember Origin Systems… 😉
Indeed.
A more valid example would be Westwood – Origin had been pretty badly managed prior to the EA takeover. EA certainly were the villains behind Origin’s downfall, but neither had Origin helped themselves much.
This is true…Westwood certainly took a turn for the suck after being bought up.
Westwood had done a lot of work for Activision at the time. Would it have been any different if they’d brought them?
Possibly — it really depends on Activision’s corporate policies, I suppose, and what expectations they would put on Westwood. What hampers a lot of EA developers is that the timelines for projects are remarkably narrow. I don’t know if Activision imposes similar hard deadlines on its subsidiaries.
Well, then, let’s revisit this one shall we?
Out of the recent (MMO)RPG-related companies that EA purchased, Bioware is the only one still in existence (Pandemic closed, Mythic is now Bioware’s Fairfax offices). Quite a different turn of events, and not quite the “worse choices” I’d said back in 2007. Sure, things are not perfect (the EA-imposed DLC stuff makes me uneasy, for one), but far better than the doom-mongering initial predictions.
I’m not 100% sold on the DLC concept yet, though under the right circumstances — and were it used to deliver more than a few new weapons and the occasional NPC — I could see it being used to great effect. ARGUABLY, something like Forge of Virtue was the 1990s equivalent of DLC, and it would be great to see DLC in this era eventually become geared toward the delivery of excellent expansion content along those lines.
It’s not there yet, of course, but I for one hold out hope. I’ve purchased some of the DLC for ME/ME2, and it’s been a mixed bag. Pinnacle Station was okay; Bring Down the Sky was excellent (if slightly unstable). Both Kasumi and Zaeed are actually useful squad members in ME2 (Zaeed makes it way more likely that your team will survive the firefight in the Collector Base). The add-on missions featuring the M-44 Hammerhead tank are pretty basic and “meh” overall, but I gather that the Overlord DLC is quite excellent, and I’m certainly going to pick up the “Lair of the Shadow Broker” DLC when it releases.
In the spirit of revisiting, I should note that my own antipathy and nervousness regarding the EA acquisition appears to have been entirely unfounded. Bioware has turned out some immense titles since then, and is working on more apparently without interference. But then, EA’s own policies seem to have shifted somewhat, and then in favour of the developers. It’s a good sign.
Pandemic is indeed gone now, though they were mostly gone even before the acquisition (Bioware basically ate them up). Mythic is still called “Bioware Mythic” by most, but officially it’s “Mythic Entertainment”. It’s still very much affiliated with BioWare, of course, though that’s not exactly a bad thing. Their Ultima Online expansion was actually quite decent, and did more to touch on points of canon than many previous iterations in the series did.
Let me just summarize thusly: I’m glad I was wrong, and that Myles was right.