Ray Muzyka and Josh Resnick BioWare/Pandemic Interview at GameSpot

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GameSpot has interviewed Ray Muzyka from BioWare and John Resnick from Pandemic regarding the merger under the lead of Elevation, asking about plans for both immediate and more distant future, as well as the role of Elevation in the joint venture. Here's an excerpt:

GameSpot: How much of a shot across the bow is the BioWare/Pandemic deal to the traditional publishing community?

Josh Resnick: That's a great question. The short answer to that is we're building a tremendous development organization here. BioWare/Pandemic have a great track record of games, like Jade Empire and Star Wars: Battlefront, and we're going to have close to 500 talented, creative, passionate people here very focused on development.

We're looking to build and continue to maintain our relationships with our great publishing partners, and we have tremendous respect for all the great publishers that we've worked with in the past. This is not something that in any way will jeopardize that. It's going to really enhance it, if anything.

We think with our renewed focus on long-term development and long-term financial perspective on the kind of games we make. We're going to be able to make higher-quality games. So we're going to be able to continue to raise the bar for the games we deliver to our publishing partners, like Microsoft for Jade Empire, and LucasArts for Battlefront, and THQ for Destroy All Humans!, and other great publishing partners we've had in the past--and the ones we want to work with in the future. We think it's going to be really a great addition to the industry.

Ray Muzyka: Just to add to that, 'shot across the bow' implies that they might feel threatened by something like this. We absolutely see the reverse. We really do look at this new venture as a means to improve our ability to deliver a great product, and I think it's going to improve our ability to focus on making great products--and that's always good for our publishing partners.

Now we're going to be so well-funded that I think it's just going to open up the range of deals and relationships that we can form with our publishing partners as well. We have a choice in not only signing in traditional developer-publisher deals, but we now have other choices on how we can work moving forward. Whether on a copublishing route, or distribution relationship, there's just now more choices, and that can only be good news.

Read the whole thing at GameSpot.