The Realities Of BioWare/Mythic Merger

Details have appeared on the reality of what the Mythic/Bioware merger means for both companies.Last week’s merger of the two companies, just as Mark Jacobs left Mythic, took many by surprise. Gamasutra caught up with Ray Muzyka and learned that it may not be as huge a change to both companies as many might think.According to Muzyka, the two companies will structurally “remain intact.””They’re working on the same projects as before,” said Muzyka, “I just have another studio that reports into me. It’s not that BioWare or Mythic is changing; they’re retaining their brands, their unique cultural identities, their projects they are working on.””Rather, a new group is being formed that is more of a reporting structure,” adds Muzyka, before detailing that the general manager of Mythic now reports to him, while all the BioWare studios did that already.”It’s a collaboration opportunity. Each of the groups continues to make the same thing in their [own locations]. But it’s fuelling and enabling more communication, collaboration, best practice sharing, encouraging each other to play each others’ games – but no formal change per se in what anybody’s doing.””[…] In the future there could be co-development. There’s nothing actively planned there right now, but I know the guys at Mythic, and in Edmonton, Austin, and Montreal are all really excited about this,” added Muzyka. “I look at it as, I have a new role now that’s additive to the past and current role. My new role is the group general manager of the RPG/MMO Group, and that’s the name I wanted to have for it. It’s not called BioWare, it’s not called Mythic; it’s called the RPG/MMO Group.”So right now, it looks like nothing much is changing, but it might make things easier for the companies and may just improve quality across the board. We’ll have to wait and see what comes out of this.