Today the studio is in crisis, 20 years ago they could have sold The Witcher and been like Steam

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In the 2000s, the then popular role-playing studio BioWare already had a digital shop for their games and it could have been much more. Because they were offered the opportunity to not only sell their own games digitally, but also games from other studios, such as The Witcher. If some things had been different, BioWare would be running the dominant PC store today and be like Steam, rather than the Half-Life makers at Valve.

This is the situation:

  • BioWare was a big deal for role-playing game fans for many years: They developed fantasy epics like Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age, but also SF games like Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic and Mass Effect.
  • Over the past decade, the studio’s fortunes have changed after Mass Effect: Andromeda and the ill-fated Anthem cost a lot of resources and people but failed to deliver the success it once did. The development of Anthem is said to have driven many employees from BioWare’s core team into illness and burnout.
  • Looking back, a great opportunity was missed 20 years ago.

    • For many, Mass Effect is considered an absolute highlight in the role-playing game genre:

    Mass Effect: Legendary Edition trailer

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    BioWare could have sold The Witcher and other big games

    What opportunity was that? In 2004, BioWare already had a digital shop through which they offered their games, such as DLCs for Neverwinter Nights.

    What is common today was something special back then. Steam only came onto the market in 2003 and it took a long time to achieve the dominant position that Steam still has today and which is extremely lucrative: Steam takes 30 percent from every PC game they sell. A license to print money.

    As BioWare Product Manager Rob Bartel told a fan magazine (via Twitter):

    “Today, digital downloads, online stores and post-release content are common and everywhere, but looking back, we missed a huge opportunity to be Steam. We were on the market faster than Valve and CD Projekt Red approached us to see if we could sell The Witcher through the BioWare store – others also approached us.

    But we rejected all of that because we felt we were diluting the BioWare brand. We’re still annoyed about it to this day.”

    The legal department was worried

    Why wasn’t that done? Some people at BioWare wanted to go in this direction and would have liked to implement such a store, but at the time the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was still very new and there was little precedent. Therefore, BioWare’s legal team expressed concerns that disputes could arise.

    The DMCA became effective on October 28, 1998.

    In 2007 Steam was still vulnerable – in 2010 it was 10 times as big

    Why was the opportunity so great back then? At the time, BioWare was busy with CD Project Red. As Gamesradar knows, BioWare helped the Polish studio gain an international foothold.

    Probably no one expected what a huge opportunity it would have been if Bioware had been able to distribute the Witcher series exclusively digitally and other hit games from that time. Part 1 of The Witcher was released in October 2007. At that time, Steam was still vulnerable, as statistics on Steam player development show (via backlinko):

  • In January 2007, Steam had 275,000 users at its peak
  • In 2008 there were already 619,000
  • Then in 2009 1.5 million
  • Finally 2.5 million in 2010

    • Maybe BioWare would have won the battle against Valve for the digital store for PC gaming and we would have a completely different gaming world today. Valve is often accused of hardly developing its own games after the success of Steam.

    We caught up with a key BioWare employee on March 26:

    Mind Behind Some of the Best RPGs Says “Maybe the Gaming Industry Deserves to Die”

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