David Gaider: on leaving Bioware, starting at Beamdog

There was a narrative after I left with which some journalists became rather enamored, and that was the notion of BioWare as some sinking ship with creative folks abandoning it left and right. The list of said creatives was always rather small compared to the total, but hey — it made for an interesting story, right?

Let me be clear: it wasn’t them, it was me. BioWare is a fantastic place to work, and I still consider the people there a kind of extended family. All the negative things I hear about other game development companies never really seemed to apply there. Yet that was part of it: I’d only heard about those other companies. Perhaps the grass is always greener and so on, but I was starting to feel that working at one company for my entire career just wasn’t cutting it. I wanted to try something new, I wanted more control over what I was doing and, even more than that, I wanted to work on something different.