BioWare’s Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka told UGO at GDC last week that since the company is no longer independent, it has a better idea of how to handle and distribute DLC.
Speaking with Tracy John, the good doctors admitted that BioWare had no idea how to sell DLC, but thanks to being folded into EA, it knows how to pump it out and ship it loads better.
“When we were an independent, we never had that information,” said Zeschuk. “We never knew what other companies’ products did or how they sold DLC. Now we see everything.”
“It’s a strategy coming right from the team and the studio,” added Muzyka. “We know it’s what the fans want, and we are trying to invest in it and make sure we have the team working in parallel with the main game team earlier in development to actually try and enable it to happen.
“It is something we think is really important to maintain continuity and could sustain the experience long-term for fans. It is definitely congruent with what EA wants too because it’s good for investors if we get more revenue; it is good for the fans, which is one of the big reasons why we are doing it, to give them content to continue their experience; and it’s actually really fun for the teams too because they enjoy using existing tools and technology and finding creative ways to deploy things. They really expressed how fun it was to make downloadable content really frequently. It is nice to have the tools and tech on a really good game to enable that.
“There are a lot of benefits of being part of a large organization because you can see how the strategies within EA are working and what’s the optimal way to promote it and build it, how to price it and if it’s a fair price for fans. It’s very consistent with BioWare. Our core values are still the same within EA: quality in the workplace for our employees, quality in our products for our fans and entrepreneurship for our investment partners. Those are still very much true.
“We learn every game with what thing works. It’s important for fans to understand that we finish our main games, and we aren’t carving things off to release as packs”.
“It’s not like a piece of lunch meat,” added Zeschuk.
“We are building a franchise. It’s part of the long-term vision, to continue to deliver content,” said Muzyka. “It’s not a find or forget mentality, it’s a continuous investment. It’s building awesome stuff so our fans continue to invest in us. We know we have to make each game better than the last, and that’s our goal.
“We want to reward (the players)”.
BioWare told us all about the different teams working on DLC during GDC, while informing us that more DLC is on the way for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2.
Yesterday, the new expansion for DAO was released into the wild, with the Firewalker DLC for ME2 out this month, and Kasumi’s Stolen Memory slated for April.
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