There isn’t a lot of news from BioWare this week. A new trailer was released for the Star Wars: The Old Republic 1.3 patch (actually, its main focus was the new “adaptive gear” that said update will add to the game), and the BioWare Blog also featured a post describing some of the other changes the patch will bring.

BioWare have also started to implement character server transfers, and are currently allowing a small selection of SWTOR players to transfer characters between a limited number of the game’s servers. Not all is roses with the process, however, and PC Gamer has a list of things to take care of before moving a character between servers.

Moving on!

A tipster with a pretty good hit/miss record briefly resurfaced, apparently on Reddit, to announce some upcoming changes that will be introduced to Mass Effect 3 later this summer, in the form of the “Extended Cut” DLC and the Earth multiplayer DLC. Also, Destructoid has a new semi-review of the game up. It’s moderately funny.

Oh, and senior Dragon Age writer Jennifer Helper was interviewed by the folks who run the BioWare Blog, and I think she all but admits during the course of the discussion that the next Dragon Age project (presumably DA3) has moved out of the pre-production phase, and into production proper.

The biggest BioWare news of the week, though, comes to us by way of Infinitron Dragon’s watchful eye, and concerns an admission made by BioWare Montreal’s development director, one Dorian Kieken.

The autonomy the company enjoys is enviable and all too rare, but its arrangement with EA is designed around success. Every penny the company spends needs to be justified by the revenue it returns, and unlike some of its peers from back in the days of Baldur’s Gate, BioWare has no guarantee of financial stability.

“In Bioware we need to have that level of discipline,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, our games are doing well, but we didn’t have a crazy breakthrough success that saved us from not being organised, like Valve and Blizzard did.

“Valve, Blizzard and Bioware all had a very similar profile over a decade ago: they were all doing very high quality games that people appreciated a lot, but at a huge cost and really not selling that much. Before World of Warcraft, Blizzard as a company really wasn’t doing well. They were very expensive, and their revenue didn’t match how expensive they were. Valve, before the huge success of Steam, really wasn’t doing well financially either.”

Now, a lot has been made of his comments, and the story has basically exploded across much of the gaming media under the all-too-delicious headline that Games Industry also attaches to the story. Of course, it’s not the whole story, but there it is: someone at BioWare commented that the company has yet to enjoy a truly breakthrough success, and everyone has jumped on that comment.

To be fair, the statement is true, at least when you look at raw numbers. BioWare hasn’t had a game sell the same maddening volume of copies that Skyrim or World of Warcraft have. Ten million copies, if not more, is a stellar and remarkable achievement, one that few games indeed will come close to reaching. And no, BioWare have not yet seen a game of theirs move that many copies, or bring in the kind of sales revenue that would follow in the wake of such numbers. Mass Effect 3 evidently sold around 3 million copies; Dragon Age: Origins sold about 2 million. Respectable numbers, yes…but nowhere near what Skyrim achieved.

This, of course, is not to say that BioWare haven’t had a large impact on the gaming world, however. Whether it’s Neverwinter Nights’ engine giving rise to The Witcher, Knights of the Old Republic’s lingering legacy, Dragon Age’s impressive ability to pop up in other media forms, or the Mass Effect series’ experimentation with having different titles across both mobile and fixed platforms (smartphones and PCs/consoles) contribute to one joint gaming experience, BioWare have done a lot of things which have had a huge impact on the gaming industry, and which will serve (in some part) to shape the face of gaming to come. They’ve produced a string of memorable titles that, with very few exceptions, draw praise and acclaim for years and years after their initial release.

They just haven’t been able to sell ten million copies of anything whilst doing so. And granted, the dollar matters greatly, so BioWare doesn’t enjoy the same stature or freedom in the market that Valve and Blizzard do. They haven’t had a breakthrough. Fortunately, this is not the same as saying that they have had no impact, no influence. And, indeed, they seem to be making their current status in the gaming market work handily for themselves.