BioWareafter many years, he is thinking back to his past and in an old interview with Wild Surge which is circulating again on the net he talking about his storea quasi-Steam according to BioWare, and the fact that it had the opportunity to publish a game that later turned out to be the first of a great saga, The Witcher.
“Digital downloads, online stores, and post-release content are everywhere now,” said product manager Rob Bartel, “but, in hindsight, we missed our great opportunity to be Steam: We beat Valve to market, and CD Projekt approached us about selling The Witcher through BioWare's store, as others have done, but we all turned them down, fearing it would somehow dilute the BioWare brand. Now we're kicking ourselves for it.”
Part of the hesitation appears to be due to fear of how copyright law would affect digital distribution. “The same goes for Apple's App Store and the idea of a free market for indie games,” Bartel said. “The Live Team wanted to go this route, but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was still new and had limited precedent, so our legal team was concerned about potential liability.”
The BioWare and Steam store, 2004 is far away
It might seem a little silly right now that BioWare could compete with Steam, but we have to remember that Valve's platform in 2004 it was more of a system for playing Half-Life 2. The creation of a large store for the sale of digital games was not an obvious concept and BioWare could have been ahead of its time.
Speaking instead of The Witcher, CD Projekt had a pretty big collaboration with BioWare early on. The original Witcher game was powered by a modified version of the Aurora Engine used in Neverwinter Nights (BioWare's store was mostly for viewing Neverwinter Nights DLC), and BioWare even hosted The Witcher in its E3 booth when company was promoting Jade Empire.
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