BioWare Co-Founder Calls Out Controversial Publisher

Greg Zeschuk, co-founder of BioWare, had some choice words for Electronic Arts, the mega-publisher who purchased the iconic developer in 2007.

At the time, the purchase was controversial. BioWare was known for its incredible, narrative-focused RPG experiences, such as Knights of the Old Republic and the original Mass Effect.

EA threatened that, though at first, they continued to succeed with the remainder of the Mass Effect trilogy and the Dragon Age franchise, developing Inquisition on the Frostbite engine wasn't a fun experience.

Zeschuk recently appeared on the My Perfect Console podcast with Simon Parkin, where he painted a somewhat grim picture of BioWare's relationship with EA. He left BioWare in 2012 because he was not a fan of the working environment EA setup. "EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself," he told Parkin. "And what I mean by that is you have to learn to work within the structure and I think we did quite well if you look at the Mass Effect’s came out there. It was actually a pretty successful run. But you have to understand how to work within a big company. And, for me, that was the end. It was like, ‘Oh, I don’t like big companies.’ So I knew by year two that I was going to leave at some point."

Zeschuk Says That Companies Like EA Exist to Exploit Popular Franchises

This shouldn't be a shock to anyone who pays attention to the modern state of gaming, but Zeschuk disliked EA's business model, which was centered around "exploiting properties."

Big companies exist to exploit properties. They exist to exploit games. Most of the big North American guys, they’re just good at ‘Hey, let’s just squeeze the most money out of this franchise.’ They don’t kind of create a lot of them, and I kind of realized early on that I like making games. I don’t like just operating.

It's not exclusive to EA. In the past, Ubisoft has released countless Assassin's Creed games, which has forced them to reboot the franchise and slow down the pace of releases. Activision notoriously swallows up developers and puts them to work on Call of Duty games.

Zeschuk also added that if Star Wars: The Old Republic had done well, he would have used the revenue to try to buy BioWare back from EA. However, he said they needed to make about "$2 billion a year to be successful," so he told himself, "Ah, I'm fine."