This publisher could have become the largest online video game store, but it made the worst decision of its existence

Game news This publisher could have become the largest online video game store, but it made the worst decision of its existence

You might have missed the boat entirely, but in the early 2000s, BioWare opened its own online store that gave itself the unique opportunity to sell many third-party games, most notably from The Witcher license, but most ambitiously. There is an equivalent platform to Steam. An anecdote recently recalled by journalist Jeremy Peele at X (ex-Twitter), who came up in a 2018 interview with former BioWare product manager Rob Bartel for the fanzine Wild Surge. And this is what he said there:

Digital downloads, online stores, and post-release content are everywhere now, but in retrospect we missed our big opportunity to be Steam – We beat Valve to market and CD Projekt approached us to sell The Witcher through the BioWare store

, like others, but we turned them all down, fearing that it would somehow dilute the BioWare brand. Even today we blame ourselves.

BioWare members apparently had some concerns about the impact of copyright laws on digital distribution. At that time, in 2004 to be precise, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was still a very recent and vague concept. Too bad, because Steam wasn’t quite the juggernaut it is today, and would have had to fear the competition. HASToday, no one, even Epic Games and its batch of free games can measure up to the Valve juggernaut. And even less publisher platforms like EA and Ubisoft.

A missed opportunity

So BioWare is content to sell DLC modules for Neverwinter Nights, the acclaimed RPG from the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Our colleagues at Gamesradar also remind us of the joke CD Projekt has collaborated with BioWare in the past, based on a modified version of the Aurora engine used for The Witcher Neverwinter Nights, and Bioware also hosted The Witcher at its E3 booth while promoting Jade Empire, whose reputation today is unmatched by the cult Witcher RPG. They would have done well to market it on their platform. In short, BioWare sometimes makes bad choices.