Ray Muyzka Interview

The folks at Play.tm chatted up BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka during GamesCom about Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, their relationship with EA, and more. On Dragon Age: Origins and its DRM:

I guess it’s important to you that you appeal to beyond the hardcore?

Yeah, yeah it is. We’ve got elements that will appeal to the traditional fantasy fans, but it’s fantasy with a edge, its fantasy with a twist, yet its accessible and deep at the same time. It’s about striking a nice balance where you’re going to reach new fans, but it will be really resonating with your traditional fans.

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The game isn’t going to have any DRM as part of it. Is that true?

Yeah, we have a simple disk check on the retail SKU.

But you’ve deliberately avoided anything more heavy duty?

We have.

Why is that? Are EA happy with that?

Well, we are EA [laughter]. We’re very happy about it. EA is very supportive. It’s a philosophy that we’re building a game, with Dragon Age, that is such as great value to price ratio, and we have such an ambitious and valuable, to fans, downloadable content plan that we trust our fans. We’re releasing a game we think they are going to see is really useful, valuable and high quality to price ration that they are going to pay us for that, because it’s evident that the game is good game. It’s a long game, a lot of content. The post-release content is going to motivate people to register with us and become customers long term. It’s all optional, but we’re confident enough with the quality of the offering that we know our fans will be loyal and support us. It’s about trust – we trust our fans. We’re counting on them to keep us in business. We ask them to consider that, to not pirate, and to support us and in turn we’ll be very, very supportive of them.