After having received reassurances on Mass Effect Next and therefore on the future of BioWare, some background information on the past of the Canadian studio under Electronic Arts emerges.
The speaker was former product manager Rob Bartel, who in 2018 (the statements were brought to the surface again online by Jeremy Peel via Twitter) had described the missteps committed by BioWare during its expansion within the gaming industry.
“Digital downloads, online stores and post-launch content are everywhere now,” Bartel said, “but, in hindsight, we missed our great opportunity to be Steam: we beat Valve to the market and CD Projekt contacted us about selling The Witcher via the BioWare store, as others have done. But we rejected them all, fearing that this would somehow dilute the BioWare brand. Now we're kicking ourselves.”
Part of the hesitation, it seems, was due to fear of how copyright law would affect digital distribution in the years to come. “The same goes for Apple's App Store and the idea of a freewheeling market for indie games,” Bartel said. “The Live Team wanted to go down this path, but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was still a very new concept and had limited precedent, so our legal team was concerned about potential liability.”
BioWare could therefore act before everyone else, but for these reasons he decided to stop. The studio launched its digital store in 2004 to sell Neverwinter Nights DLC, when DLC was still a very new concept. The idea of a publisher store in direct competition with Steam might seem laughable today, but it's worth remembering in 2004 the Valve platform was seen as little more than an annoying DRM measure to access Half-Life 2.
Bartel also talked about how CD Projekt has had a rather notable association with BioWare in the past. The original Witcher game was powered by a modified version of the same Aurora Engine that BioWare used in Neverwinter Nights, and the company even hosted The Witcher at its booth at E3 when he was promoting Jade Empire.
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