BioWare Video Game Project Management
Project management
Project management is an integral part of managing an organization to bring about change that benefits the organization itself and other stakeholders. Project management involves allocating the required amount of resources, updating goals, assessing risks, maintaining documentation, and performing many other tasks to ensure the product is delivered within the specified time frame. . Therefore, accurate and effective management is crucial to the profitability of the project. As Schwab (2019) pointed out, the world is going through the fourth industrial revolution led by digital technologies, which is why software development companies must pay special attention to project management. This article introduces the problems that BioWare, a Canadian video game developer under the American video game publisher Electronic Arts, encountered in the development of a recent project. This would suggest that BioWare, which is regulated by EA, has shown the ability to integrate resources and continuously update development, but is too optimistic to provide clear scope and intent, and problems with customer understanding.
context information
BioWare is a video game development studio based in Edmonton, Canada. It was founded in 1995 and quickly found its niche in creating detailed and immersive role-playing games with complex storylines. The studio’s big hit was Baldur’s Gate, a 1998 role-playing game based on the Dungeons and Dragons board game (Schreier, 2017). The studio has since released more Dungeons & Dragons-based titles and collaborated with other major franchises, such as partnering with Lucas Arts on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Schreier, 2017). In the 21st century, the studio created two major franchises: the space opera series Mass Effect and the dark fantasy series Dragon Age, whose first games were released in 2007 and 2009, respectively (Schreier, 2017). Since then, BioWare’s primary focus has been on developing these two franchises.
In 2007, EA acquired BioWare and assumed the studio’s publisher role. This customization makes a difference in product delivery. While Dragon Age: Origins, released in 2009, was a critical and commercial success, its 2011 sequel, Dragon Age 2, was widely criticized for being incomplete (Schreier, 2017). Dragon Age: Inquisition won Game of the Year 2014, but suffered from a series of development problems due to poor resource allocation and management issues (Schreier, 2019, para. 7). The Mass Effect series has stagnated, with the third installment released in 2012 being criticized for its poor ending, and 2017’s Andromeda for its unimaginative gameplay and numerous technical issues.
EA’s perception of how its product should play has also been the source of a lot of questions. As a publisher, EA insists that all of its core products are “games-as-a-service,” meaning they can be played continuously for months and years after launch, with the possibility of purchasing new content (Schreier, 2019). The requirement meant massive online multiplayer and put BioWare, known for making deep single-player games, at odds with EA’s general direction. The BioWare project began delivering new products based on various EA demos. Star Wars MMO The Old Republic missed its 2009-2011 deadline (Schreier, 2017). Anthem, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) shooter, encountered so many technical issues that teams working on other projects were forced to move to it as well (Kain. 2019). Missed deadlines, numerous resource allocation issues, and generally lukewarm criticism that indicated a lack of quality in the delivered product, the recent BioWare project had several lingering management issues.
BioWare Project Management Evaluation
BioWare’s project management practices on its recent projects have demonstrated the company’s ability to continuously monitor work progress and introduce updates as necessary. Heldman (2018) states that “regular monitoring and measuring project performance” is an important part of monitoring project work (p. 479). he
