BioWare is gone: EA shuts the Edmonton studio and cancels the next Mass Effect

The end of a 31-year run

Electronic Arts confirmed Wednesday that it is shutting down BioWare, the Edmonton studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and cancelling the next Mass Effect game, which had been in early development by a small team. The studio said it in a farewell post on X: "Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending." The next Mass Effect was first teased in 2020 and never shown beyond trailers and teasers; the last new entry in the series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, released in 2017.

The cuts

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports that about 400 EA employees — roughly three per cent of the company's workforce — are being laid off, including around 50 people at BioWare. In an internal letter, EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber said the company had taken "a hard look" at its business and was concentrating on fewer, large-scale projects, adding that BioWare is "a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre" and that the decision was not taken lightly. A Sims project code-named Project Lotus is also being dropped, while work continues on Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game.

Why now

BioWare's last release, 2024's Dragon Age: The Veilguard, reviewed well but missed EA's sales expectations, and the studio had already been downsized to a single project before this closure ended its 30-plus-year run. The cuts come two months after EA went private in a $55-billion buyout led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — a deal that, Polygon and VGC report, left the company around $18 billion in debt with roughly $1.8 billion a year in interest payments, after EA promised investors $700 million in annual cost reductions.

The Canadian angle

BioWare was founded in Edmonton in 1995 by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip — doctors-turned-game-makers who built Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and KOTOR before EA bought the studio in 2007. Its closure is the biggest loss in the history of Canada's video-game industry, with about 50 Edmonton jobs gone and a studio that once anchored Alberta's games ecosystem shuttered. The city that gave gaming Commander Shepard just lost the studio that made her.