BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" and don't get it

Re:BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" a... by wongarsu on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:28AM (#50337282)

Imho the strength of Indie games was being able to try ideas too risky to bet AAA budget on, or to target niche audiences deemed too small to make AAA profit

Neither of these is going away. The marketing strategy of teasing your game for months or years to build a fan base is going away. But if you life by "put up or shut up" I believe there is still room to win on vision alone.

If you don't have a unique enough vision (like most AAA, visions are risky) then I agree that you have to migrate up and just outspend everyone else

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Re:BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" a... by hnick on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:03PM (#50347898)

There's some kind of business concept (that I'm sure many around here know more about) around making decisions cheap to reverse. AAA studios are the antithesis of that.

It's a creative process. It looks great all the way through until it comes together and... it just feels wrong. The scene doesn't work for some reason.

So now we re-write. Translate into the five languages we support. Hope the voice actors for those languages are all available. Maybe even re-record existing lines to fit the new tempo. Maybe mo-cap, maybe new 4K textures, maybe more.

At this point I'm sure people in the room are definitely trying to convince themselves that, actually, it really wasn't that bad. Let's keep it. No one will care it's just one scene.

Rinse and repeat. It costs a lot more to fix mistakes on high fidelity games so I wonder how many just get left alone on purpose.

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