For thirty years, BioWare made games about impossible choices. On Wednesday, Electronic Arts made one about BioWare.
The publisher announced it is shutting down the Edmonton, Canada studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age — two of the most beloved role-playing franchises ever made — and cancelling the next Mass Effect game, announced in 2020 and never shown beyond a handful of teaser clips. Roughly 400 jobs are being cut across the company, about 50 of them at BioWare itself, according to Bloomberg. That is around 3 percent of EA’s workforce — and nearly a whole studio.
In an internal letter, EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber wrote that they had “taken a hard look at our business,” and said the company was focusing on proven hits: Apex Legends, Battlefield, its sports franchises, an Iron Man game from Marvel, the next Star Wars Jedi, and a new Star Wars Battlefront from Respawn and DICE. “BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre,” the letter read, “and we do not take this decision lightly.”
The studio said goodbye on its own terms on social media: “What generations of BioWare built together is something to celebrate and remember. These games became so much more because you played them, debated your choices, fell in love with the characters, and made these worlds your own.”
The cuts went beyond BioWare. A Sims title known internally as “Project Lotus” has been paused so the team can refocus on another project, “Project Evergreen,” and the team behind the skating game skate. is being downsized.
If you have never played a BioWare game, here is what is being lost. BioWare, founded in 1995 and bought by EA in 2007, did not make the industry’s biggest games — it made the ones people still argue about decades later. These were story-first games where your decisions carried consequences across an entire trilogy: which alien civilization to save, which companion to betray, what kind of hero you became. Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire — and then Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which turned that formula into global franchises with characters fans tattoo on their bodies.
The last decade had already been unkind. Mass Effect: Andromeda landed to a shrug in 2017. The studio’s live-service pivot, Anthem (2019), failed outright and was shut down earlier this year. Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) split fans and critics. The new Mass Effect, announced six years ago, became the studio’s last bet — the one game that could have reset the story. Now it will never ship.
Look past the obituaries and the balance sheet tells its own story. EA went private in August in a $55 billion deal led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the firm founded by Jared Kushner. Reports put roughly $18 billion of debt on the company — debt that costs about $1.8 billion a year just to service. EA has promised its new owners roughly $700 million in annual cost cuts. A studio that needed years and big budgets to make single-player epics was never going to survive that arithmetic.
That is what makes this bigger than one studio. The games industry has been consolidating for years, and every blockbuster now costs so much to build that a single flop can end a career — or, as here, a studio. Private equity is paying record prices for game publishers, and the bill always comes due in layoffs and cancelled dreams. This week, the bill landed on the people who taught an entire genre how to tell stories.
One footnote keeps the flame alive, barely: a Mass Effect television adaptation is in development at Amazon Prime Video. The world BioWare built may yet survive on screen — just not in the hands of the people who built it.
