Yeah.

I could start citing examples, but I have to be at a Scout camp in half an hour, and wouldn’t want to be late.

As I note in the above, my friend Myles — who has several contacts at BioWare — has said that on the whole, the employees of the company have a positive air about the deal, so I’m willing to concede the existence of at least a glimmer of hope. I guess it depends on how much development autonomy BioWare is being given.

The thing I don’t get is that EA has a pretty rigid policy concerning game development — titles have to have a 12-to-18 month development window, and that’s about it. For things like sports games, that works well enough.

BioWare, though, has a history of taking three to five years to develop titles fully (they’ve been working on Mass Effect since…what…2002? 2003?), and I wonder how that’s going to fit in with EA’s corporate culture.

Guess we’ll see.

Remember Origin Systems…

A more valid example would be Westwood – Origin had been pretty badly managed prior to the EA takeover. EA certainly were the villains behind Origin’s downfall, but neither had Origin helped themselves much.

Westwood had done a lot of work for Activision at the time. Would it have been any different if they’d brought them?