"EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself"

BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk has spoken up for his studio’s owner and publisher EA.

In the same Games Industryinterview where he discussed the console market’s poor health, Zeschuk shed light on working under the company crowned worst in America.

The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself,” Zeschuk said.

It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that’s something to remember – while we were independent we didn’t have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like ‘wow we can do all this stuff.’ We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.”

Zeschuk specifically recalled a moment a few months into BioWare’s buyout by EA sitting around asking how do we do stuff."

It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don’t second-guess you, they don’t say you shouldn’t do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn’t like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.”

Being independent I would say we had to be more conservative – being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that’s something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little.”

EA purchased Bioware ahead of Mass Effect’s launch in 2007.