EA Is Closing BioWare: What It Means for Mass Effect and Dragon Age
I replayed these games more times than I’d like to admit. Turns out that was not a business model. Now EA is Closing Bioware.
BioWare is closing, and it’s hit me in a way I didn’t expect. It’s a strange thing to be upset about a company I’ve never met, never worked for, and only ever dealt with by making questionable dialogue choices late at night. BioWare didn’t just fall off a cliff, it hit rock bottom. The devs have even been leaking the trailer for what would have been a new Mass Effect. Sad we will never see the real game.
On October 21, EA confirmed the studio is shutting down after more than thirty years, and that early development on the next Mass Effect is ending with it. The Edmonton office goes too. It’s part of EA’s restructure after being bought out. Apparently they are cutting around 400 jobs, roughly 50 of them at BioWare. In the studio’s own goodbye post, they wrote, “There is nothing easy about writing those words” (Game Developer). They also listed everything they ever made, Anthem (which horrifically failed) included. I respect that. That’s honesty.
What Actually Happened
Quick background: EA bought BioWare back in 2007, and a few months ago a group of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (plus Silver Lake and Affinity Partners) bought EA in a $55 billion deal (Game Developer). So now we’ve got a restructuring, a closed studio, and a canceled Mass Effect. Great.
The letter to staff came from a couple of EA’s top execs, who basically called all of this a “hard look at the business.” Where EA is putting its energy is pretty clear: Battlefield, Apex Legends, and a team-up between Respawn and DICE on a future project. That project??? Star Wars: Battlefront 3 (noice) (Variety), I’ll come back to that.
I Could See It Coming. That Didn’t Help.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out in October 2024, and EA said only about 1.5 million players showed up, which was nearly 50% below what they expected (Windows Central). After that, BioWare shrank down to a small core team working on the next Mass Effect. I could see where this was heading.
But I think the ownership change was the last nail in the coffin. A company that just got bought for $55 billion needs that money to come back from somewhere, and my read is that the new owners want fast returns. A small team making a single-player RPG every several years is not what fast returns look like. That’s a hard spot to be in, somewhere between a rock and a corporate hard place.
Former BioWare lead Mark Darrah has said the unreasonable expectations EA put on the studio are why Veilguard fell short (GamesRadar). I think that’s a massive part of it. We have seen it time and time again with EA. The other part is that BioWare hadn’t put out much, and what it did put out wasn’t landing the way the older games did.
Politics or Sales?
Here’s the part I keep going back and forth on. BioWare’s games have always had LGBTQ+ characters and romances, and Saudi Arabia’s PIF is now the lead owner of the company that owned them. It’s hard for me not to wonder whether the new owners looked at the messaging in these games and decided it wasn’t something they wanted to keep funding. Nobody has said it, and EA’s own explanation is the “hard look at the business” in that letter. But I don’t think it’s a crazy question to ask, and I think it may have played a role.
Since not everyone has played them, here’s what I mean. BioWare has been doing this forever. Knights of the Old Republic (2003) had Juhani, who PC Gamer called the studio’s first gay party member (PC Gamer), and Jade Empire had a same-sex option with Sky. Mass Effect 3 gave us Samantha Traynor and Steve Cortez, the first BioWare romances written only for same-sex pairings, and Kaidan became romanceable for male Shepard (BioWare Blog), (TechRadar). Even the original Mass Effect let female Shepard romance Liara.
Dragon Age went the same way. Inquisition gave us Dorian, introduced as BioWare’s first fully gay male party member, and Krem, the first transgender character in a BioWare game (Wikipedia). Veilguard took it further with Taash as a nonbinary party member and dialogue that lets you establish Rook as trans (Inverse). So if a new owner went looking for something to object to, there was plenty, going back more than twenty years.
At the same time, I don’t want to pretend the numbers aren’t sitting right there. Veilguard sold well below expectations and the studio’s output had been low for years. The Mass Effect remaster did numbers, sure, but a remaster of an old game isn’t the kind of new release that keeps a studio alive. My honest read is that sales were the final nail, and that the messaging question, made the decision easier rather than making it by itself.
What EA Is Betting On Instead
EA’s letter calls Battlefield 6 a great success, and it was. It was the best-selling shooter of the year, even outselling Call of Duty (VGC). That success is sitting in the same announcement as hundreds of layoffs. That’s the part I can’t get past. Whatever the formula is, success doesn’t seem to be the thing that protects anyone.
The same letter says they “learned a lot from the launch and the live service” (Variety), and that’s the tell. EA is focused hard on games as a service (oh wow shocker, EA wants more money from skins and boxes), and a studio that makes big single-player RPGs doesn’t fit that plan. I’d bet money the debt that comes with a buyout this big has something to do with it.
Fewer games with “more” resources behind them, which is what EA claims it’s going for, sounds great until you’re one of the people making them. If every release has to make millions or your job is gone, that’s a lot of pressure on the folks at the bottom who just built the thing. My suspicion, is that closing BioWare is as much about cleaning up the balance sheet as it is about any one game. Reports that EA’s leadership signaled more cuts to people and projects could be coming soon (GamesRadar) don’t make me feel better. (Let’s hear it again from those in the back: “FUCK EA. FUCK THOSE MBAs”)
What We Actually Lose
The part that really stings is the IP. Mass Effect and Dragon Age are the two biggest, and I have no idea whether either will see daylight again. EA still holds the rights, so they aren’t technically dead yet. But they’re in a drawer, and I doubt anyone is going to open it.
I know Veilguard had a lot of flaws. I still found joy in it. I wouldn’t replay it countless times the way I have the older Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, but it was a chance to visit a world I cared about. Now those stories won’t get their endings, and Mass Effect is truly gone. I also know the BioWare we knew and loved wasn’t really there anymore even before the closure. But the spirit of the company and its IP was still around, and now it isn’t.
Some Glimmers of Hope
Thankfully, a lot of the older BioWare developers seem to have landed at new studios, and spiritual successors are out there. The one with the most fans’ hopes are riding on is Exodus, from Archetype Entertainment, a studio founded by BioWare veterans including Mass Effect writer Drew Karpyshyn (Mezha). People keep comparing it to Mass Effect, and it’s currently slated for April 7, 2027 (The FPS Review). I have my fingers crossed. (Elfishchunk is already obsessing over it – nerd fucking loves scifi)
There’s also a small glimmer in the same announcement that closed BioWare. EA said Respawn and DICE are teaming up on a future project, and Variety says it’s Star Wars: Battlefront 3 (Variety). I know it will have a season pass similar to Battlefield’s. But since it’s a Lucasfilm and Disney property, I don’t think they can make the cosmetics completely outlandish. Battlefront 2 launched as a loot box cautionary tale, so my bar is on the floor. And it’s years away, too far off to get excited about yet.
Gone, But Not Forgotten
I’m still looking forward to parts of where gaming goes from here, and to finding the spirit of these worlds in new games. But the passage of time and the greed of corporations still sting. BioWare is gone, but far from forgotten.
Awkward_Rock has replayed the older Dragon Age and Mass Effect games more times than he’d like to admit publicly, and plans to keep doing it out of spite. He has taken this one hard and is currently at rock bottom, which at least puts him in the right place for the brand.