EA shuts BioWare and cancels the next Mass Effect

The studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is closing. BioWare said on Wednesday that “after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending”, as Ars Technica reports. The post came minutes after Bloomberg reported about 400 job cuts across Electronic Arts, around 50 of them at BioWare; Variety puts the total at roughly 3% of EA’s workforce.

Why it happened

BioWare was founded in Edmonton in 1995 and bought by EA in 2007. Its recent run was rough: Anthem, its live-service shooter, was shut down earlier this year, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard missed EA’s sales expectations, according to Engadget. EA itself is now private after last year’s $55 billion buyout led by Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners, which left it with heavy debt. Analysts warned at the time that layoffs and studio closures would follow.

Our take

This is a business decision dressed in a eulogy. A small team was only in early work on the next Mass Effect, so EA is choosing to stop paying for a long, expensive single-player project rather than trying to fix it. The rest of the memo tells you where the money goes instead: Battlefield, Apex Legends, a new Respawn and DICE shooter (Variety says Star Wars: Battlefront 3), a returning Fight Night and an open-world American football game. Skate developer Full Circle is being trimmed too, and Maxis has paused “Project Lotus”.

For players, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age names belong to EA and could return with another team one day, but the studio that defined them will not. It follows other recent studio failures such as Samson developer Liquid Swords’ bankruptcy. If you want story-driven games in the meantime, subscription catalogues like this month’s Game Pass wave are a cheaper way to explore than day-one purchases.