Earlier today, a story published on Kotaku highlighted some behind-the-scenes trouble BioWare went through to launch Anthem. Bioware has responded
Earlier today Kotaku’s Jason Schreier published a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Anthem and how BioWare struggled with the game, up to its launch. It’s a lengthy read. Shortly after this story went up, BioWare prepared a response, directly tied to it.
While BioWare’s response is not as lengthy as Schreier’s thorough reporting, it does attempt to address several things brought up in the article, such as crunch time, specific leaders behind the game, and how the article, they feel, does a disservice to the creative video game industry as a whole.
“We put a great emphasis on our workplace culture in our studios. The health and well-being of our team members is something we take very seriously,” the BioWare blog post read. “We have built a new leadership team over the last couple of years, starting with Casey Hudson as our GM in 2017, which has helped us make big steps to improve studio culture and our creative focus. We hear the criticisms that were raised by the people in the piece today, and we’re looking at that alongside feedback that we receive in our internal team surveys. We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid ‘crunch time,’ and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems.”
The post details how the creative process behind any video game is challenging, especially when it’s a brand new IP. “The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real,” it reads. “But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
It’s unlikely Kotaku plans to respond. However, Schrier has posted from his Twitter account about the response, sharing how multiple employees presently, and no longer, with the company are dishearted by BioWare’s painful response. They feel the company is dismissing these deplorable conditions. Not only that, for those who read the full article, it almost feels like BioWare wanted their fans to go after Schrier for his hard work.
Overall, it’s not a good look for BioWare. You can read BioWare’s full response on their blog over here.
