In the 2000s, the then-popular role-playing studio BioWare already had a digital shop for their games, which could have been much more. They were offered not just to sell their own games digitally, but also the games from other studios, like The Witcher. If a few things had been different, BioWare would today be operating the dominant PC store like Steam, and not the Half-Life creators at Valve.
This is the situation:
- BioWare was a big deal for role-playing fans for many years: They developed fantasy epics like Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age, but also sci-fi games like Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic and Mass Effect.
- In the last ten years, the studio’s fate has turned after Mass Effect: Andromeda and the unfortunate Anthem consumed many resources and employees but not the success of the past. The development of Anthem reportedly led many employees from the core team of BioWare to sickness and burnout.
- In retrospect, a great opportunity was missed 20 years ago.
Many consider Mass Effect to be an absolute highlight in the role-playing genre:
BioWare could have sold The Witcher and other major games
What opportunity was that? In 2004, BioWare already had a digital shop where 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 took a while to achieve the dominant position it holds to this day and which is extremely lucrative: Because Steam takes 30 percent of every PC game they sell. A license to print money.
As BioWare’s Product Manager Rob Bartel told a fan magazine (via Twitter):
“Today, digital downloads, online stores, and content that comes after the release are common and everywhere, but in retrospect, we missed a huge opportunity to be Steam. We were faster to market than Valve, and CD Projekt Red approached us to see if we could sell The Witcher through the BioWare store – others approached us too.
But we turned it all down because we felt we would dilute the BioWare brand. We still regret it today.”
The legal department was concerned
Why didn’t they do it? Some people at BioWare wanted to go in that 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 were few precedents. Therefore, BioWare’s legal team would have raised concerns that it could lead to disputes.
The DMCA came into effect on October 28, 1998.
In 2007, Steam was still vulnerable – by 2010, it was 10 times larger
Why was the opportunity so great back then? At that time, BioWare was close with CD Project Red. As Gamesradar knows, BioWare helped the Polish studio to gain an international foothold.
Probably no one expected what a huge opportunity it would have been if BioWare could have distributed the Witcher series exclusively in digital format along with other hit games from that era. The first part of The Witcher was released in October 2007. At that time, Steam was still vulnerable, as statistics on the player development of Steam show (via backlinko):
- In January 2007, Steam peaked at 275,000 users
- By 2008, it had grown to 619,000
- In 2009, it had reached 1.5 million
- By 2010, it had finally reached 2.5 million
Perhaps BioWare could have won the battle against Valve for the digital store for PC gaming, and we could have a completely different gaming world today. Valve is often accused of having hardly developed any more games after the success of Steam.
On March 26, we discussed with a key employee from BioWare:
