BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" and don't get it
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- “Anthem” was literally built to be full of grindy bullshit right from day 1.
- “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” was a total travesty. SkillUp called it a “collosal disappointment” and said the writing made “every interaction (between characters) sounds like HR is in the room”
- “Mass Effect: Andromeda” I remember reading a review which says “the game has already become its own meme at this point”. Even people who were charitable to it admitted it was worse in just about every respect than the trilogy that it followed.
…And things are going to get worse before they get better. If you turn your gaze onto another legendary studio with train-wreck management, I can’t conceive of Elder Scrolls 6 being any good given that I found Fallout 4 disappointing and since then everything Bethesda has put out since then (just their own in-house stuff, not things they publish so I’m thinking of Id and Arkane as separate here) has been a catastrophe. In a sign of how bad the mismanagement is there, Id software which has put out banger after banger which have been commercially and critically successful has seen significant layoffs in spite of that. “Starfield” was terrible, “Fallout 76” was unquestionably one of the worst games of all time at launch (although they have somewhat improved it since then). Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.
The desire by execs to grow studios into these behemoths has led to them losing track of what makes games fun.
That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.
A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.
Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.
Anyone who says this isn't the case needs to go back and play it. It's TOUGH gameplay wise.
Specifically, I didn’t find the gameplay of ME2 to be much better (and in some places, e.g. the Probing Uranus minigame, it was worse).
Some of the people that worked on that Bioware are working on Exodus which was a very interesting story.
Like imagine I work at Nintendo and I pitch to leadership: “OK I’ve got an amazing idea for the next Mario game. The way it’s going to work is you have a stamina mechanic so if you jump too much you run out of breath so then you can’t jump until you sit still for a while and recover. And it’s going to be an RPG so you can play for 100 hours and specialize your Mario into various classes and have different kinds of weapons …”
They’re going to put a hand on my shoulder and say 1)That stamina thing sounds like it wouldn’t be fun. 2) The RPG thing sounds like the sort of thing that people aren’t really looking for in a Mario game. There are good games that have a stamina mechanic. There are great games that have RPG mechanics and class specialization, but none of them have anything to do with what makes Mario great.
Nintendo leadership have a really strong conception of what makes a fun game and what makes their particular games distinctive. That’s how they come up with innovative concepts (like super mario wonder or the last DK game) that still feel 100% rooted in what makes those series good.
Getting a story-driven studio to build a looter-shooter was just a terrible idea and the also executed it badly in anthem. Whatever it was that they were trying to do with Veilguard, (I heard that started as a live service and then pivoted), someone senior should have had the courage of their convictions and asked the question of whether someone who loved dragon age inquisition would love this game or whether indeed it was fun at all.
I feel that everyone is throwing so much money at games these days but they have in many cases lost sight of why people play games in the first place.
Sadly, though, the story left a lot wanting. It felt like multiple writers had inserted their own incomplete story lines, so by the end of the game, you're left with unresolved plot threads regarding the Remnant, the Scourge, and the Kett, among other things. The only somewhat resolved plot thread is colonization via ending up inside the Remnant dyson sphere, but that basically renders all the effort you just spent terraforming planets throughout the game moot.
At least with the original trilogy, you're defeating Sovereign in the first game and the collectors in the second game, giving you some form of resolution, even if it was always clear the trilogy was going to lead to a full reaper invasion in the third game. And across all of them, your singular focus was on the reapers and not spread across multiple threats.
I can imagine a universe where Bioware stuck with scripted single player RPGs and faded along with the genre. In which case we might have been at the same point by now, just with a different list of games to use as conversation fodder.
I heard elsewhere - I forget the name of the journalist - that the real root cause was that EA pushed for a yearly release cadence like they’re used to with their sports and sim titles. That version of the story has Bioware juat generally struggling to adapt, and the specific questionable decisions are just symptoms of the underlying problem.
I like it because it fits nicely with the immediate situation: 50 people working on a game that will need a huge headcount ramp-up and multiple years to ship, and EA just deciding they would rather put their money into a more immediate payoff.
Has the genre really faded? Larian seems to have done quite well with BG3 and the Divinity predecessor games. Owlcat games with Pathfinder series and Rogue trader has also done well.
I would have much rather Bioware tried to do a similar last hurrah with an isometric RPG or any RPG for that matter. I suppose they have, with Andromeda, but that is 9 years old already.
Ultimately, I think Bioware's problem is much simpler - the greatest talent has already left by the time Andromeda released, and the leftovers were too busy checking boxes on corporate cultural requirements rather than making an actual game.
There was probably a huge cultural shift in the years that followed the EA purchase, which was already a decade before Andromeda. Frankly I struggle to justify Bioware's relevance after the ME Trilogy was concluded. I could not get into a single one of their games past that, started a few, but never finished.
That's been the case for just about every Gamebryo/Creation Engine/Todd Howard game. TES4 and everything after kinda blurs into the same slop for me. I remember people saying F3 was 'Oblivion with guns', and Skyrim was 'Fallout with swords', and having played all those for hundreds of hours, those statements aren't wrong.
Halfway through my second playthrough of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been playing (more or less) the same game for 10 years. Same gameplay loop, more shallow characters, and more mediocre writing, and to top it all off, I wasn't enjoying the open world/sandbox all that much. Not to mention, all of them have the same weird kinds of bugs and crashes. I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass.
There are certain genres that the big AAA studios basically pump out and certain genres that indie devs basically pump out.
Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.
(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
Even Alyx is 6 years old, if that's your best example of an innovative AAA game, you're already in trouble.
The required investment is just a lot larger in AAA. So just from a risk management perspective, people look to reduce the risk level.
Doesn’t really lend itself to creativity unless people involved have a track record.
I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.
For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.
The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.
As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.
Maximizing profit often points the gaming cos towards gating the fun behind a paywall, or teasing the fun that could be had behind the next payment. It turns out that players don't find that fun (see Star Wars Battefront 2).
Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.
The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.
If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.
My point is that there are bifurcated consumer markets and you only spoke to a narrow subset.
I have a very nice PC for gaming and even still most games I play looks like it could run on a potato XD
to be clear, they never sold to EA directly
Got into a PE ownership agreement with Pandemic Studios in 05 because they couldn't afford SW:TOR on their own, the co founder of the PE firm backing them went to EA, then EA purchased the holding corp.
They raised like $300 M between the studios because they couldn't afford the dev costs for SW:TOR (Somewhere around $200 M over 6 years per Gamespot) - and like everything PE touches, all they care about is money so they were more than happy to flip the holding corp to EA for a really nice ROI.
But I agree, kleiba should give it a go. I don't want to downplay the value of a co-located team with industry experience but these can be overcome.
Note that GP said ‘get into the industry’ and not ‘take it up as a hobby’.
Also, without having tried at all, I'm doubtful whether I could land a gig. Even though I've worked in and around IT most of my professional live, I don't have any relevant experience. And I doubt that I could work in an entry-level position: I'm old on the one hand (not attractive for employers) and have more bills to pay now than I did in my 20s (not attractive for me).
It also gives you a chance to see how much you like it before you commit. If you don’t enjoy it enough to keep up doing it purely for fun, you might not like it enough to want to do it as a high pressure career choice.
If you have any games on PC there is a huge community making mods available on the Nexus mods website. That is one way to start, tons of people have ideas to improve existing games and have found an outlet for it there. I would never have finished Silksong without those mods. There are also a ton of mods via Steam, Skyrim has a all sorts of mods from gameplay to visual changing all sorts of behavior and looks.
However, if you're looking to be part of a larger team, that is indeed a challenge with the limitations you mentioned.
It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.
Nothing is stopping you from downloading Unity or Godot.
The actual business sucks though. It’s very hard to make money or stay employed. Industry legends are on LinkedIn soft begging for work*.
Edit: Work , not workers.
It’s a fantastic hobby though
And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?
The odds of making enough money to match even a lower end tech salary are astronomically low.
But learning Unity to learn programming is how I became a programmer in the first place. I’ve done very well for myself.
Even now I find games push me to develop my skills. Vs actual work which is usually boring.
For sure, but to make anything bigger than a toy game, you'd need a set of skills that is not easy to come by in a single person. Say, coding, graphics, and sound are completely different area, and within each, you typically have sub-specializations...
That said, if anyone's up for founding a purely virtual game dev studio, hit me up!
Now the smaller toy games tend to be more fun for me.
stares in Minecraft
So even if she doesn't know about creating video games, I wouldn't judge her as "a business first gamers last" type of person.
I wouldn't be so sure about that
There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.
There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.
You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.
as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.
the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.
writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better. they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.
the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.
It's not like the execs are coming up to the meeting room and saying "Hey, let's make a shitty game because I am an idiot who wants to lose money...".
Their games are just bad, man. They don't know how to write a good story like in the first mass effect, they don't know what makes a game fun, and this is the natural result.
Companies at this scale also see individual developers as cogs which whilst true to a point misses the importance of both the group of individuals and their social fabric have in making a great game.
Which is a long winded way of saying yes it’s the developers that made a commercial flop but that might have been the best result possible in the circumstances. And the buck with setting those circumstances stops with the executive team.
The business side is more critical than the development side - so business folks should be running what is a business. If the business goes down, it'll take the down game, however great it is.
The big but though, is that to be a successful business you need to feed, nurture and protect the creative side. The creative side in turn has a responsibility to the business - if you've burnt through a hundred million and decide you need to start-over, that's on you.
My completely uninformed opinion is that once the business screws with dev ("Let's turn this thoughful narrative game, into a free-to-play-shooter!") dev probably just check out, do what they're told, and take the pay-cheque until it stops. I'm not a game dev, but I've had dumb corporate overlords.
Basically EA can burn in hell - but the development side is rarely faultless.
I don't think Indie games "are better" - but I think they tend to better deliver on a coherent vision. Most crash and burn, but the few that make it to my Steam account are wonderful. Not because they're all perfect - but because I heard a voice in it.
They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.
It is worse than not having played games at all because when people around them take on the task of making games with intensity and zeal and solemnity and great care, they can roll their eyes and think "it's not that serious, nobody really cares about this stuff". When people have passionate arguments about creative direction they feel they can see the bigger picture and rise above the petty squabbles by saying that the artistic direction doesn't matter. They know it doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter to them, and to all the other people who, presumably, are like them.
I think that they are wrong, but I think the task of explaining to them why they are wrong is like trying to teach a devout atheist why religion matters. It will be a long and hard uphill battle and in many cases likely utterly impossible.
> They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
You can extend this to the amount of interest in games, casual vs competitive gamers.
This isn't to say that games (and other media) should always be laser focused on one type of person but you do have to use good judgement to decide who your audience is, what they like and what you should leave out of the game. MMOs show some natural segregation of players when they have private servers, you end up with many PvP only or PvE only servers along with many other variations of things the game mechanics and mods allow e.g. strict role play servers.
There's even terminology directly related to your quote, casual gamers vs hardcore gamers and it should be well known by now that if you make compromises in your game to suit both you'll end up being disliked by both. It's better to lean in to one play style a measured amount. If you're making a game with PvP as a core mechanic make sure the PvP experience is good but not so hardcore that it alienates people who are new to PvP. Don't sacrifice important parts of the gameplay because you might also want to attract PvE only players.
Innovation and risk taking is something that smaller business do.
It's very easy for executives and management to be so disconnected from the people who make up the market they are serving. When success is determined by innovation that serves that market, detachment can be a fatal flaw.
The trend has been they focus on quality, rarely compromising their vision, which started as niche gameplay ideas that are now a new genre, adopted in many new games. And the effect has been that they got a reputation for quality, and sell more and more games with each new release, with elden ring selling like 36M copies.
I mean, even in the software industry, this is the modus opperandi for a lot of business : Founder of startup focus on the product and growth until they become valuable enough to be brought up by one of the big company.
Netflix and co, might upend or stall that cycle, same as Steam/MS/etc can stagnate the games business.
I think games still has a cycle or two before being totally stagnant though, but regulators are working hard to fix that.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) cost over $700 million to make.
I can't imagine anyone qualified to run billion dollar projects has much time for any interests other than running billion dollar projects.
These projects wouldn't be sustainable without an audience of gamers rewarding it with purchases and microtransactions.
> I can't imagine anyone qualified to run billion dollar projects has much time for any interests other than running billion dollar projects.
counter example: Concord
We are seeing that there are a lot of players that did stop rewarding the companies as described. The problem is that the signals are not being picked up in these studio's. Partially due to the big divide between critical acclaim vs player reception that we have been seeing in games in the past decade.
Mass Effect or Dragon Age could've flopped like Anthem did and we would never hear from them again. In fact the first Mass Effect was pretty rough in terms of gameplay, as was the first Witcher game (and arguably the later ones and Cyberpunk because they all needed serious rework and bugfixing after release). Yet they're still popular because something else compensated for their technical issues.
This is a funny thing to post after the recently viral video of the McDonalds CEO allegedly not being able to take a bite out of a McDonalds burger without gagging.
Your comparison also doesn't make sense, it's more like the executives of AAA game studio's have never seen or bothered to understand how a game is made. To keep the fastfood analogy perhaps it would be similar to the McDonalds CEO never having cooked or stepped into a kitchen, and would never choose to eat a burger. It's like if the CEO of Warner brothers has never set foot on a set or in Hollywood or even never seen a movie.
I suspect (as the comment from Zeschuk also suggests) most AAA game studio's are run by executives that never played a video game in their lives let alone enjoyed it. And they literately don't know how the sausage is made.
"BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio."
Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now. The individual developer simply cannot keep up despite being able to do more than they ever were before.
If you seek evidence of Jevon's paradox I think you may find it here. Albeit in a very undesirable form. Even if I can now do 100% more work per unit time, my prospective customer is demanding 300-400% on top of that in terms of the final delivered experience. The water level has gone up everywhere and continues to rise rapidly. Even outside of game development. Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Neither of these is going away. The marketing strategy of teasing your game for months or years to build a fan base is going away. But if you life by "put up or shut up" I believe there is still room to win on vision alone.
If you don't have a unique enough vision (like most AAA, visions are risky) then I agree that you have to migrate up and just outspend everyone else
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
> Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Again, not sure how this relates to BioWare. Andromeda and Veilguard were both widely regarded as embarrassing failures and both of those were pre-AI. They hadn't released any titles in the AI age before dissolving.
> Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now.
Phantom Blade Zero just came out. It was made by S-Game, which apparently has fewer than 20 core staff members, though the game was worked on by around 200 people when you include contractors. It sold 4 million units in 3 days and is currently the #2 most played game on Steam.
Smaller game studios can do fine. They just need to make good games.
By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?
As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now. The fact that Valve might occasionally select lottery winners is separate from other forces involved. I would hesitate to highlight the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success as some kind of evidence that there is nothing to see here.
> They just need to make good games.
If only we could just do that.
This was a problem pre-AI, too. There's more AI-generated slop at the bottom of the barrel but in general people were not discovering games by scrolling through every new release on Steam. And certainly they weren't doing that for anything with the budget of Andromeda or Veilguard.
> As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now.
I think this is on you more than anything, PBZ has been getting heavily hyped up and currently has 60k viewers on Twitch, early on a Monday in the US, which is pretty damn good. The existence or non-existence of AI games doesn't seem to be impacting anything here.
> the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success
All success in the entertainment is "artificially-promoted". Marketing exists for a reason.