Yes, they did do a good job. No, it's not only about money (in fact, I think I said "building a business", not "money").
Yes, I understood - I just shortened "building a business" down to "money" for the sake of simplicity. My mistake
… I would suggest their success comes from an excellent publisher (in terms of understanding RPGs), the D&D license and the people they hired…and the doctors are clearly very intelligent men. For me, their great work was with Interplay - BG, BG2, NWN (yes, NWN was published by Atari but the hard work was all done with Interplay). Then they left and made Jade Empire and Mass Effect. See a pattern? I do …
I think I understand your point. The "Biodocs" themselves had… let's call it an "interest" … in making games, but they mainly wanted to build their own successful business using video games as a means to achieve that goal. In that case, it wasn't the
owners of the business that had a passion for RPGs, but the people that were hired to design their games that loved RPGs. Fair enough, I think that's a completely valid point given the info available over the years, so I agree with you on that front.
I don't know if they "grew too fast" - Elevation Partners and then EA spent a ridiculous amount of money on them so their strategy worked for where I am sitting.
True, but that was only a short-term success (a
very profitable short-term success, of course). What I'm saying though is that if their long-term goal was to build a sustainable business that makes a healthy profit each year, then perhaps they did grow too fast. You already mentioned a low-ball estimate on what they might potentially pay each year in salaries alone. From my point of view, that size seems to be too large to sustain the business given what a triple-A studio (from
any genre) can reasonably expect to achieve in terms of profit each year. In short, the massive and rapid growth after the Elevation Partners and EA deals is too much to sustain itself considering they grew
before they had a means to cover their new losses each year. (Although I suppose TOR might prove me wrong on that when it gets released…
)
You ask why move out of a profitable niche? Because it's a niche! If it was all about hardcore RPGs, you'd be right. If a big part of the appeal is growing a substantial business it makes perfetc sense to move out of niche RPGs. If anything, I think your point proves they wanted to grow the business above other considerations. No?
Certainly another very good point. However, my point that you quoted there was actually operating under the assumption: "Yes, Bioware's main goal is to build a sustainable and substantial business." If that is indeed the case, then why not simply grow the profitable niche? Calling Bioware a "niche" pre "market shift" is a bit of a stretch anyway, considering the level of visibility that their games all the way from BG 2 and Kotor through DA:O received. So my point is that Bioware's products were once very unique, being created as story-driven, moderately complex RPGs with AAA polish/production values. Having a product separate itself from the crowd is obviously a huge advantage in any business, and after the early success of the company, it would make sense to grow that uniqueness even further. As reasonably solid as Bioware's RPGs were, they still had so much untapped potential; potential that might have grown their "niche" into something very unique and massively successful.
Besides, their recent efforts to finally
completely cross over fully into the mainstream (the early steps towards this had already been done in years past, but it was previously a careful, more subtle balance in my opinion) hasn't brought them any growth, and in the case of DA2, actually lost sales compared to the "niche" title that preceded it. ME2 didn't blow away its predecessor in terms of sales either. So can you really say - purely from a business perspective, not through the eyes of an RPG player - that DA2, ME2, and future games in a similar model are good business-growing decisions? Granted, it is just two games that have attempted to be mainstream blockbusters, so time may prove me wrong as Bioware gains more experience in their new approach, but I think they might have been better off staying in (and growing) their comfortable, AAA "niche."