BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk has spoken out about the closure of BioWare last week, which saw 50 jobs lost as part of 400 cuts across the company, along with the cancellation of Mass Effect 5, which we’ve now come to learn (via a leaked internal trailer) was called Mass Effect: Universe.
Speaking to 80 Level, Zeschuk lamented the end of the studio but said he went through his own emotional goodbye to the studio after he and fellow co-founder Ray Muzyka departed it on their own terms back in 2012, several months after the launch of Mass Effect 3. “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.’” He continued: “I’m just at a point in my life where I’ve got my own other business,” he said. “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.”
That said, he certainly had opinions regarding the closure of the great RPG studio he helped build. “I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t suck,” he said. “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.”
Regarding the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s $55 private buyout of EA, Zeschuk said he wasn’t surprised that BioWare was ultimately shut down. “I think it was the final nail in the coffin,” he said. “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.”
Zeschuk wasn’t shy about his feelings on executives without any game-development experience owning and running game development studios.
“There’s this weird belief that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn’t work,” he proclaimed. “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.”
Public reactions to the closure of BioWare and cancellation of Mass Effect have been strong. Here at IGN, I wrote about how BioWare was the greatest RPG developer ever, Jackie Thomas lamented that BioWare will never get the chance to redeem itself after Mass Effect Andromeda, and Matt Purslow wrote that EA never really knew what it had with BioWare. Meanwhile, composer Austin Wintory revealed he’d been in discussions with EA and BioWare about composing the soundtrack for Mass Effect 5 and was such a fan of the series that he even went so far as to release 22 minutes of Mass Effect music he’d created to help convince the publisher to hire him. And in the wider gaming public, fans expressed anger and sadness at the loss of a studio with such an incredible legacy.