Had BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk’s industry “swan song,” Star War: The Old Republic, been more successful, he dreamed of sticking around a while longer to try and take over parent company EA from the inside.
Talking to the My Perfect Console podcast about his time at BioWare after EA snapped up owner VG Holding Corp., he says it took two years to be certain working under a global publisher wasn’t for him. While Zeschuk pushes back on the idea that BioWare’s problems started with EA – the studio had “a pretty successful run” with the likes of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 – a lack of “entrepreneurial-ship” wasn’t for him, so he retired.
“EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself,” Zeschuk says (thanks, Time Extension). “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 Effects 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. I just didn’t know when.”
Why doesn’t Zeschuk like big companies? As he explains later, “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.”
Still, that’s not to say things couldn’t have been different. In fact, Zeschuk says a dream of his was taking over the company from the inside and changing things for the better. The issue, however, was that he’d need his Star Wars MMO to be “super duper successful.”
“I lived in Austin for two-and-a-half years making Star Wars the Old Republic [and] I knew that was kind of a one-way trip,” he says. “If it was super successful, super duper successful, Ray and I would have probably launched a bid to try and take over EA from the inside, being the corporate pirates that we are. But it needed to be like $2 billion a year successful. But it didn’t work out, so I was like, ‘Ah, I’m fine.’”
What could have been.
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