Mike Hickey - The Benchmark Co. LLC
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just two for me as well. Curious if you could give us a deeper perspective, I guess on what's happening within BioWare. Mass Effect I think from a quality perspective didn't exactly hit the mark and it looks like we've now delayed the anticipated new IP which sometimes is also tied to quality. So curious if there's any change in leadership or developer turnover. What sort of [happening] internally within BioWare?
The first thing is, is Mass Effect is an interesting title. It was in development for a really long time and represented a lot of the great things that BioWare is known for: story, size, depth, breadth, imagination. And while overall, the aggregate review scores were lower than we would have liked, we did have over 100 reviewers score the game at 80 or higher. So it represents a fan base that's very passionate; looking for very particular things. And many players found exactly what they're looking for and some players did not.
With that said, we believe Mass Effect Andromeda delivers a rich, deep experience which celebrates what makes the franchise great: wonderful, beautiful, deep rich worlds, amazing combat and engaging fast-paced, multiplayer. New multiplayer content is continuing to be released and new content kind of arriving overall more regularly so. We're very happy with kind of how BioWare is doing, how BioWare is treating Mass Effect. And our expectations for Mass Effect are still strong for the future and the franchise overall.
In terms of the new IP, the choice to move the new IP and what happened with Mass Effect are completely unrelated. The realities is we have a creative process. As a company, creativity and pioneering is really important for us. Now, innovation in games is important more now than ever. And as a leader in the industry, we see it as our responsibility to innovate. And as part of our creative process – and I get to be involved in that creative process – we recognize that there was so much more opportunity in a connected network social world to do some things in the new BioWare game that had never done before and we don't think anyone is going to do anytime soon. But by virtue of our network, our cross-platform presence and our scale, we think we can do that. And we chose to give the team some more time to deliver against that innovation because we believe players are looking for the kinds of things that we plan to put into that game.
And so we're very happy with BioWare. BioWare has continued to support Mass Effect, and the new team is doing some amazing things, and you'll hear more about that in the months to come.
A bit of a nothing answer really but still interesting to see.
