BioWare - What's in a Name?

GamesIndustry.biz retraces the transformation of BioWare after it was acquired by EA and the branding around it. The article is part of GamesIndustry.biz's 10 Years Ago This Month series (don't get confused by the following, unrelated stories).

BioWare plays the name game

EA tries to get the most out of the beloved studio behind… Command & Conquer?

[...] Electronic Arts has had reputation problems for a very long time. [...]

People just plain didn't like the company. But there was one exception: BioWare.

EA acquired the RPG developer in 2007, a month before the launch of the original Mass Effect.

People loved BioWare. Even before Mass Effect and Dragon Age gave EA hit RPGs on both sides of the science fiction/fantasy spectrum, people loved BioWare for making instant classics like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It helped that BioWare was one of the earlier developers to lean into direct lines of communication with its players and really cultivate an enthusiastic fandom. (As is often the case, the company was eventually held hostage by that fandom, but that's a discussion for the March 2022 edition of 10 Years Ago This Month.)

The BioWare name was so powerful, its reputation so built up, that not even existing under the umbrella of EA could tarnish it. EA no doubt noticed this and looked to capitalize on it.

It started almost reasonably. In 2010, EA took another acquisition, Mythic Entertainment, and renamed it BioWare Mythic. It raised some eyebrows, but Mythic was an established MMO developer and BioWare was working on its own Star Wars MMO at the time. Given EA's lack of other RPG or MMO developers and the fact that the two studios had actually been merged into their own division of the company the prior year, it was fairly defensible. The fact that Mythic had actually already been re-branded as EA Mythic and then regained its identity by dropping the EA tag also suggested a certain distance from the larger EA operation that likely helped mute any backlash to the change.

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