Following BioWare announcing its closure and the cancelation of its Mass Effect project, co-founder Greg Zeschuk has spoken about the studio. In an interview with 80 Level, Zeschuk, who had worked at the company until his departure in 2012, spoke about having dealt with the emotions after the announcement, and how, while he has his own things he is working on, the closure of BioWare is still “kind of sad”.
“I’ve kind of gone through all the emotions like long, long ago,” he said. “You have to break from it and kind of go, ‘OK, I’ve had my emotional moment.’ I’m just at a point in my life where I’ve got my own other business. My [beer] brewing business is going really well. I’ve got a whole other thing I’m doing, and I’m not sentimental or nostalgic. I’m kind of, like, that chapter’s closed.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t suck,” Zeschuk continued. “And I think it’s kind of sad. It’s actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we’re from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that.”
Further in the interview, Zeschuk also spoke about how BioWare’s closure isn’t really a big surprise following EA being acquired by a consortium of investors comprised of Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake. “I think it was the final nail in the coffin.”
“I think that was the crux of it in a sense. Once again, it’s a completely different company now… BioWare makes these kind of unusual games that take a long time, and they’re complicated and so it’s easier just to pump out sports games every year, and that’s a better business model in some ways.”
Generally speaking, the fact that leadership among game companies is often made up of people who don’t tend to have backgrounds in game development is a detriment to the industry. Noting that one can’t simply “recreate great games with random people and AI”, Zeschuk said that this “weird belief” still remains a “harsh reality” these days.
“There’s this weird belief that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn’t work. The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track. Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don’t know how it works.”
Zeschuk is one of many who have spoken about BioWare’s closure and the ultimate fate of Mass Effect. Since the announcement was made earlier this month, writers and artists on the project took to social media to discuss the experience of working at the studio, and former executive producer Mark Darrah even expressed the belief that EA might be open to selling the Mass Effect IP someday.
