BioWare's co-founder Greg Zeschuk recently made an appearance on Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console and, in the process, revealed why he left the company and his wild dream of launching a bid to take over EA from the inside.
EA acquired VG Holding Corp. — the owner of both BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios — in 2007, resulting in BioWare becoming a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. This is something that many BioWare fans online have attributed over the years as the downfall of "BioWare", but as Zeschuk argues, it wasn't as initially disastrous as most people make out, with the company immediately going on to have "a pretty successful run" with games like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
Nevertheless, as he went on to explain when speaking to Parkin, he understood after only two years of the company being owned by EA that working for the global publisher wasn't necessarily the perfect environment for him, disliking the lack of "entrepreneurial-ship". This is what led to him eventually announcing his retirement from BioWare in 2012.
"EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself," Zeschuk told Parkin. "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 Effect’s 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."
He later elaborated on why he dislikes big companies, stating, "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."
Following this point, Zeschuk went on to describe BioWare's Star Wars MMO, Star War: The Old Republic, as his "swansong" in the industry, claiming that had it been more successful, he dreamed that he might have ended up sticking around for a bit longer to try to take over the company from the inside and change things.
"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 told Parkin. "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.’"
The full episode of My Perfect Console is available to listen to now for members of its Patreon and will go live later this week.