SimonTheFrog wrote...
There was an interesting article on GamesIndustry: bioware-we-havent-had-a-breakthrough-success confirming your post that EA has basically nothing to do with what BioWare does. EA sets the budget and the expected return. BioWare has to do everything else. This includes the EC and other DLC's.
I'm not trying to protect EA. But it seems that they are much less involved in the ME franchise than what people think.
The complaint about EA is not that they directly interfere with the game's content, (At least not from my point of view.) but rather that it has a corporate culture which is damaging to the actual product. As they guy explains, EA sets the budget, and tells Bioware what the return should be. That's actually an incredible amount of power. Bioware needs money to make games, and if they do not perform, EA will reduce their budget and their 'freedom'.
Think about it. EA focuses on profit first. EA doesn't care about games, or even industry/consumer awards for its titles, only the number of titles shipped, and any further profit it can make from, for example, microtransactions like ME3's multiplayer equipment packs. EA demands profit. To give EA that profit, Bioware has to put profit first. To meet the budget it's given, Bioware has to make sure that it releases enough titles within specified time frames - whether they are ready or not, whether they have reached their true potentials or not. Thus, Bioware's priorities shift to make sure that games make the most profit, and not that their games are all they can be. It doesn't have to be directives handed down from on high, they just slowly come around to EA's way of thinking, because they now must operate towards the same reward system that EA does. As someone once said 'Bioware have gone from a company that makes money in order to make games to a company that makes games to make money.', and that is EA's doing.
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