It's been almost 15 years since BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced their retirements from the videogame industry, and they've been resolute about staying out of it ever since: Muzyka continues to head up the ThresholdImpact investment firm he founded in 2012 and holds multiple roles at the University of Alberta, while Zeschuk owns Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company, also based in Alberta, where he works with a small handful of other BioWare veterans.
But Zeschuk stepped back into the videogame spotlight, briefly, following last week's closure of BioWare by parent company Electronic Arts, telling 80lv that he got the news hours after it happened because he was on a fishing trip, and by the time he flew home a couple days later, he'd "already shelved it away."
"I wasn't there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it," Zeschuk said. "I’m not saying it doesn't hurt and doesn't suck. And I think it's kind of sad. It's actually, in some ways, saddest for the city of Edmonton, where we're from, because we were kind of this beacon of hope and excitement and possibility. We showed you could do something really special in a place that was not known for doing things like that."
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Zeschuk said he had his own "emotional moment" about BioWare years ago, when he left the company; his real concern now is for the people at the studio who now find themselves out of work: "Anyone getting put into the job hunt is a sort of terrifying endeavor and super sad."
He also said he has no regrets about the EA acquisition, saying it offered "stability" as the studio continued to grow and that "we saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks." At the same time, he had a feeling when EA was acquired by Saudi Arabia's PIF that it probably wouldn't go well for BioWare, because it doesn't fit into the guns-and-sports model: "BioWare makes these kind of unusual games that take a long time and they're complicated and so it's easier just to pump out sports games every year and that's a better business model in some ways."
Zeschuk was also critical of the idea, seen in the recent wave of studio mergers and AI-powered cutbacks, "that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI. It doesn't work," Zeschuk said.
"The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track. Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don't know how it works."
Zeschuk does know how it works, and he was clear that he's not interested in going back. "For me it was time to go, and I kind of walked out of the games business without any intention of ever returning. I'm happy being a consumer and playing games," he said. "I have my opinions on how to make stuff, but as enticing as it would be, it's just not [worth] the personal struggle and cost and effort required to make a great game. Having gone through the crucible of game development, I'm not going back in there."