Another One Bites the Dust

Dungeons, Dragons, and 401Ks.

Doctors and highly successful CEOs? Way to make the rest of us RPG nerds look bad by comparison, guys.

BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk announced that they are both retiring from the world of game development today. Although BioWare is famous for their older RPGs like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate, they also enjoyed recent success with franchises like Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. So why leave a successful company you helped create? Ray (we're good friends) would have us believe that he simply wants to tackle a new set of challenges, while Greg (again, good friends) notes that he is leaving to make beer.

But is there something else going on here? When BioWare was purchased by Electronic Arts (henceforth referred to as EA) in 2007, the collective gaming world groaned. EA had a history of buying up studios, turning their franchises into yearly releases, and ultimately running them into the ground before finally closing the studio. Surely this couldn't happen to BioWare, a studio whose work was synonymous with quality, could it?

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, BioWare. It tolls for thee.

Perhaps it could. Or can. Or did. Many people see today as the death knell for BioWare, a company that has slowly been circling the drain in terms of quality if you believe the volume of posts deriding the quality of Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Maybe none of those games were critical failures in terms of sales, but every title saw backlash against it for one reason or another. Many people saw the faults in those games as a result of EA meddling in the development process. They could be right; maybe Greg and Ray (see you guys at poker on Thursday) got sick of corporate politics bastardizing their children, and decided to step down before things got any worse.
One thing is for sure, where BioWare used to make games out of love, EA only sees the bottom line. The corpses of defunct studios that EA stands on top of is a mountain of evidence that suggests exactly that.