BioWare "missed our big opportunity to be Steam" and sell The Witcher: "We’re kicking ourselves about it now"

BioWare opened its own digital storefront back in the early 2000s, and the legendary RPG studio had even briefly considered selling third-party games on that store - including The Witcher.

That insight comes from a 2018 interview with former BioWare product manager Rob Bartel in the Wild Surge fanzine, with a telling quote recently highlighted by Jeremy Peel on Twitter. "Digital downloads, online stores, and post-release content are everywhere now," Bartel said, "but, in hindsight, we missed our big opportunity to be Steam - we beat Valve to market and CD Projekt approached us about selling The Witcher through the BioWare store, as did others, but we turned them all down, fearing that it would somehow dilute the BioWare brand. We’re kicking ourselves about it now."

Part of the hesitance, it seems, was fear about how copyright law would affect digital distribution. "Likewise with Apple’s App Store and the idea of a free-wheeling marketplace for indie games," Bartel said. "The Live Team wanted to go down that route but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was still very new and had limited precedent so our legal team was worried about the potential liabilities."

BioWare launched its digital store in 2004 to sell DLC modules for Neverwinter Nights - back when DLC was still a very new concept. The notion of a publisher store directly competing with Steam might seem laughable today, given the reputation platforms from publishers like EA and Ubisoft have always held among PC gamers, but remember: in 2004, Steam was seen as little more than an annoying DRM measure for Half-Life 2. It's easy to see a world where some other company might've figured out the allure of digital distribution before Valve got it right.

CD Projekt actually had a pretty notable association with BioWare in its early days. The original Witcher game was powered by a modified version of the same Aurora Engine used in Neverwinter Nights, and BioWare even hosted The Witcher at its E3 booth back when the company was promoting Jade Empire. (You should check out NoClip's documentary on CD Projekt's early days if you want more of that story.)

These days, Jade Empire is largely remembered as a footnote in BioWare's history, while The Witcher would set CD Projekt on the path to becoming one of the most notable studios in the industry, and I can't help but wonder what would've happened if that association had stayed a little closer.

If you want to know about all the upcoming CD Projekt Red games, or The Witcher 4 in particular, you know where to click.