BioWare has always produced top notch games, but in recent years the developer has truly become an RPG powerhouse, easily making itself one of the most valuable developers within publisher Electronic Arts' studio system. Each of its games has been a breakout success, and now EA is pumping huge money into Star Wars: The Old Republic.
IndustryGamers recently had the chance to meet up with Dr. Ray Muzyka (CEO and General Manager, BioWare & Vice President, Electronic Arts) and Dr. Greg Zeschuk (President and General Manager, BioWare & Vice President, Electronic Arts) to talk about the latest BioWare successes, the pressures of building The Old Republic, the state of Japanese RPGs, working with motion controls, among other topics.
IndustryGamers: Your two major successes on the market now are Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. Would you say that those have exceeded your expectations, or just met them? They’re both doing phenomenally well.
Ray Muzyka: Yeah, I think we have really high expectations. Our teams are really pushing for each game to be better than the last. All of our main releases have always been like 90+ Metacritic, you know, and a pretty high bar to exceed. Mass Effect 2 has definitely exceeded that; Dragon Age has actually exceeded it, as well… Both exceeded our sales targets.
Greg Zeschuk: It keeps kind of going up. Every game is bigger than the last one, from a sales perspective. At least it takes off…
Ray Muzyka: In terms of just fan feedback, it seems like both are really resonating with the fans. We’re selling a lot of post-release content on both games, and that’s been really, really successful, as well. It’s almost like a virtuous cycle of, “we make great stuff, and the fans paid for it, and we get to make more good stuff.” We’re thinking of all of our games now as a platform, and once we launch them and whether we’re supporting them through subscriptions like an MMO like Star Wars The Old Republic, or episodic delivery of content, post release downloadable or expansions like the Awakening expansion of Dragon Age… we’re always thinking of it as a service and we’re continually having to release more stuff. You’ve got to continue to build on it and make it really good so the fans continue to support you and so you can do more.
IG: Right. And I guess you see that as a way of combating the used market? You sort of give the game legs and people are more reluctant to sell it at GameStop because they want to hold on to it to be able to play that content over the months to come. Is that actually a strategy to fight the used game business?
Greg Zeschuk: I think in that sense it’s almost… we don’t really worry so much about that as much as creating that long term relationship with the consumer. I think we’re all working on what’s probably going to be a long-term digital relationship with people. I think that this is our… Cerberus, for example. It’s quite literally a service, as Ray noted. This Cerberus thing appears in your Mass Effect screen, and gives you information. What it’s really about is the more general longer-term monetization... you know, we’ve had no DVD business, like the movie business had. You release your game, and whatever happens, happens. This gives us actually a longer-term perspective. It actually allows us to look a little more ,even just more than regular retail… a little more subscription-based business. It’s not the same, but it just keeps it going.
Ray Muzyka: Community building… and sort of building that long-term relationship where the fan stays integrated in, no matter how they access the original piece of content, whether that’s a new purchase or a used game. At the end of the day they’re still consumers, they’re part of our community of players. If we can find a way to partner with them, then we’re giving them stuff they want, they’re paying for it, and we’re getting to build more great stuff. Think about it, it sort of goes with that service orientation just building more stuff out long term. It’s a really positive win-win for everybody. And that’s the key, to make it feel like it’s a really high-value add for the fans. At the end of the day, a game’s got to be fun. If they’re not high quality, there’s lot of other choices. The fans can go elsewhere. Our competitors are doing really great games, too. We’ve got to always strive to try and out do them.
Greg Zeschuk It’s kind of like almost… our ideal world is that we’ll make more on PDLC and post release sales of any type than the original game ever sold for, anyway. That’s kind of like the long-term view. I think, collectively, we’re moving into that kind of business.
IG: Right, that seems to be a huge focus for EA.
Greg Zeschuk: Yeah.
Ray Muzyka: Take a look at the lifetime value of a consumer. If you keep them engaged, and believing in you and trusting in you, and you never break that promise of trust, you can have a really good relationship for many, many years, and not just on one product, but for years and years into the future.
Greg Zeschuk: Well, that’s one of the neat things about the BioWare community. It’s pretty strong, and very vibrant, and it’s kind of…. One of the most fun things for me when I look at our forums, we give people the ability to put in their information to list which games they own. And there are guys with like every single game we’ve ever released on the message boards. For them, it’s like a real badge of pride. Here’s how serious a consumer and how much of a long-term customer this person has been. I just really like that.
IG: Speaking of community, social games on Facebook have been huge, and it’s really exploded over the last year. Is that something where you would ever consider saying, “Hey, let’s try and create a mini social game?” Maybe have a division of Bioware that actually does that? EA's been leveraging the Playfish acquisition to bring more EA properties to Facebook for more of that social gaming experience. Could you envision any of that for BioWare?
Ray Muzyka: We actually did a Facebook app. I don’t know if you played it or not, “Gift of the Yeti.”
IG: I meant an actual full gaming experience, not just like a little “gift” app.
Ray Muzyka: Yeah, but you’ve got to start… you learn by experimenting and trying things. That’s why we tried that and said, “we’ll give it to our fans and learn how they play it and use it and learn from the experience.” And we are actually quite inspired by a lot of the features of social games. It’s cool to imagine ways you can pull in social features into your main properties, or have them sort of as a social game/applet or something like that. You could surface your character on your Facebook page. Make choices and do auction trades… things like that. It would be kind of cool for some games in the future. There are ways to enable social gameplay that are really seamlessly integrated with the main experience and they could be in the game or out of the game… it's almost like a different form of narrative that occurs with the interaction, a synchronicity between players outside the game that kind of… just builds on and helps to develop and keep them engaged in the main game experience.
IG: I wanted to get your take on the state of the Japanese RPG. My colleague, David Radd wrote an opinion piece a little while back sort of just talking about how the Japanese RPGs have become sort of stagnant, and there’s not been a whole lot of innovation…
Ray Muzyka: I read that.
IG: Yeah, and, of course, he mentioned the BioWare games. Whether it's BioWare, or Lionhead, or Bethesda, the Western RPG makers really seem to have stolen the thunder of the Japanese developers. I’m just curious about what your thoughts are on the Japanese RPGs and what’s going on between East versus West.
Greg Zeschuk: Well, it’s interesting. I think in the past year we saw a very interesting counterpoint to that argument, which was Demon’s Souls. That title was, in my mind, probably one of the most innovative RPGs/games in ages. So, there’s still flashes of brilliance, obviously, and I think… I haven’t played Final Fantasy XIII yet, but obviously I hear a lot of how they’ve gone a very different direction than one they’ve traditionally gone: much more streamlined, which is interesting. So, I think what happened is they got very complacent for a very long time. They kept making the same thing, and the same thing, and, in a sense, almost provided an opening for all of us to jump in with our style of games. I know first hand that they’re looking at our games now; they’re kind of looking at our stuff, the Fable stuff, and Fallout, and all that, and going, “what are these things?” I think they had gotten used to making the same thing over and over, and it was working. I think the other thing, too, is that the Japanese market has gotten quite a bit weaker and weaker. It’s just not as strong a market. It used to be a tremendously strong game market, so I think they’re kind of looking at it going, “man, we’ve got to figure out where else we can sell these,” and I think the traditional, very structured, old-school structure RPG wasn’t selling anymore; so now, I think we’re going to see some changes. I think Final Fantasy XIII, you know, I can’t say first hand... but I know definitely Demon’s Souls was a very, very different direction than any Japanese RPG I’d seen before.
IG: Ray, anything to add to that?
Ray Muzyka: Well, I mean, everybody’s got to be always innovating and always trying to look for new opportunities to build on what they’ve done before. Any group, not referring to any particular one, [but] any studio or group, or any country that has certain development aesthetics, you know, from past times, that doesn’t continue to innovate will get left behind; so, I think it’s refreshing to start to see some of the stuff that Greg referenced appearing.
IG: I guess a lot of it is the cultural differences and the tastes of the Japanese gamers versus the tastes of the Western gamers.
Greg Zeschuk: Yeah.
IG: I’m actually curious; do you have any feedback from how your games are received in Asian countries, or in Japan? Do those gamers like having the choices and the sort of character development that you guys provide?
Ray Muzyka: What’s interesting, is Mass Effect is obviously on a platform, on Xbox, that isn’t as big in Japan, relative to how it [has] done in North America and Europe. When it launched in Japan, which it did – it was localized and launched in Japan – the original Mass Effect, through Microsoft, it was at the top of the charts, which was really cool. It actually exceeded their forecast by a lot. The Japanese gamers seemed really into it. It will be interesting to see how some of our other titles do, when they make it there…
Greg Zeschuk: We get anecdotes from folks we know, but beyond that, we don’t really know. Certainly it’s hard enough to know our own customers in North America that we’re very familiar with; that’s in our back yard, but then you look elsewhere, you research everything else, you try and learn. It’s very challenging.
IG: Do you guys feed off of the other Western developers? Exchange some ideas, whether it's Peter Molyneux or Todd Howard…
Greg Zeschuk: We’re actually mortal enemies of those guys.
(laughter)
Ray Muzyka: We’re big fans of their work, actually. We play their games; I’d say they’re friends. There’s a lot of people we respect in the industry. Feed off is...
Greg Zeschuk: There’s a very healthy competition actually.
Ray Muzyka: When we play something cool, we send it around to our teams; we talk about it actively, about features we’re trying to emulate and build on in our games, for sure.
Greg Zeschuk: It’s sort of a positive competition in a sense that, there’s this feeling that the stronger we can all collectively be, the stronger that segment gets, the more people get that kind of game. I think it is growing the pie, right? Especially as we all push on the boundaries of the RPG into interesting areas. We’re all pushing in different ways; we’re all pushing in different kinds of directions. I think that’s really positive. We’re not really mortal enemies.
(Laughter)
Ray Muzyka: There’s room for more than one great entertainment experience out there. That’s the great thing about entertainment: people make time in their busy lives if there’s something that’s really memorable and cool. Even if there’s a couple of things like that at any point in time, they’ll go see a couple of movies, they’ll go play a couple of games, they’ll read a couple of books. There’s a lot of opportunities for that. You don’t buy one piece of music and then that’s the only one you ever listen to. You want multiple pieces of music, multiple television shows; you follow multiple movies, multiple books, and games.
