{"id":17243,"date":"2012-09-20T05:26:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T10:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17243"},"modified":"2012-09-20T06:22:45","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T11:22:45","slug":"bioware-zeschuk-and-muzyka-have-left-the-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17243","title":{"rendered":"BioWare: Zeschuk and Muzyka Have Left the Building"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/news\/view\/119650-BioWare-Co-Founders-Retire\" title=\"BioWare Co-Founders Retire - The Escapist\">leaving the company<\/a>. According to their own announcements on the issue, they&#8217;re not pulling a Pete Molyneux and going indie. They are very explicitly retiring from the games industry altogether.<\/p>\n<p>Now would be an excellent time to bring up the BioWare video from Mr. Nerdrage. I love this video not just because I agree with it, but because he takes the points I&#8217;ve been arguing for years and puts them into a nice organized package. <\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/A6TmTv6deTI\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=A6TmTv6deTI'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve said or touched on many of these same points before:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Tone at the top: The leadership sets the values for an entire company.\n<\/li>\n<li>Just because a company is big and powerful doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s being run optimally, or even competently.\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;All our games should be like FIFA&#8221; and &#8220;all games should have multiplayer&#8221; are great examples of what you get when non-gaming executives look at sales trends and make broad decisions for developers, ignorant of the fine details.\n<\/li>\n<li>Games should be getting cheaper to produce, not more expensive.\n<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;we make money to make games&#8221; versus &#8220;we make games to make money&#8221; mindsets will ultimately produce different sorts of products. This circles back to the &#8220;values&#8221; point in #1.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Seriously, someone needs to get <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/Campster\" title=\"Errant Signal\">Errant Signal<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/MrBtongue\" title=\"MrBtongue on Youtube\">Nerdrage<\/a> under the same roof of long-form academic-style analysis. And the guy who makes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HhyyUiYQolA\" title=\"Reset Button: The Biggest Game Ever\">Reset Button<\/a> should totally make more videos. <\/p>\n<p>The frustrating thing about the story of Zeschuk and Muzyka leaving BioWare is that everyone has a strong desire to read between the lines. We want to know what&#8217;s been going on at BioWare over the last few years. How did SWTOR end up as such a <a href=\"?p=14239\" title=\"Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta Impressions\">soulless<\/a>, <a href=\"?p=16538\" title=\"Star Wars The Old Republic: Artless in Alderaan\">ugly<\/a>, <a href=\"?p=16434\" title=\"Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Trial\">broken<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/news\/view\/117159-EA-Blames-Casuals-For-Falling-Old-Republic-Subscriber-Numbers\" title=\"EA Blames Casuals For Falling Old Republic Subscriber Numbers\">disappointment<\/a>? Was the Mass Effect transition move from &#8220;thoughtful&#8221; to &#8220;shooty&#8221; something that BioWare chose, or something imposed by EA? Was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=onr_z45NVyI&#038;feature=plcp\" title=\"Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage: Dragon Age 2\">the smaller scope and art recycling<\/a> of Dragon Age 2 a result of a creative decision, or from executive pressure to make Dragon Age a FIFA-ish yearly title? What happened to the small, creative company launched by three passionate guys that turned it into a grinder of perma-<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Video_game_development#Crunch_time\" title=\"Crunch Mode - Wikipedia\">crunch<\/a> and revolving-door contract work? How can a company change so fast in such a short time?  <\/p>\n<p>Basically, how much blame can we put on hated EA and how much can we spare Zeschuk and Muzyka?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, unless someone writes a tell-all book we&#8217;ll probably never know. In fact, not even then. We don&#8217;t know, and we can&#8217;t know. All we can do is guess and argue and speculate, which is what we&#8217;ve been doing since EA bought BioWare in 2007.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka are leaving the company. According to their own announcements on the issue, they&#8217;re not pulling a Pete Molyneux and going indie. They are very explicitly retiring from the games industry altogether. Now would be an excellent time to bring up the BioWare video from Mr. Nerdrage. I love [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-17243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-bioware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}