EA Shuts Down BioWare, Cancels the Next Mass Effect and Cuts About 400 Jobs After the $55 Billion Saudi Buyout
By CriticalPixel ·
BioWare is finished. On October 21, Electronic Arts told employees it is closing the Canadian studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, shutting its Edmonton workspace, and walking away from the early development work on the next Mass Effect. The announcement landed inside a wider restructuring that, according to Variety, cuts about 3% of EA's global workforce, while Bloomberg's figure, as relayed by GameSpot, is roughly 400 people. This is the first major move since the $55 billion Saudi-led buyout closed, and nobody should be shocked that it opened with a studio funeral. People have been predicting this kind of cleanup since the deal was announced, and today the bill started coming due.
What EA Actually Announced
The news came in a memo from Cam Weber, president and chief studios officer, and David Tinson, president and COO, and EA published it on its own site under the title Building EA's Next Chapter. The language is pure corporate fog: deliberate choices, deepen our core, saying no to some things we are passionate about. The part that matters is buried in the action-adventure section. EA says it had a small team at BioWare working on early development for Mass Effect, that it made the decision not to move forward with that development, and that this means it is closing the studio and the Edmonton workspace. Read that again. The studio is not being closed because a game flopped, it is being closed because the one thing it was building got cancelled, and nobody at EA seems to have considered giving that team anything else to make.
The numbers differ slightly depending on who is counting, so here is what is on the record. GameSpot's first report said about 50 BioWare employees are affected alongside 350 more elsewhere at EA. Its longer rundown, citing Bloomberg, says the studio employed fewer than 100 people and that the total cuts hit around 400. Variety puts the overall figure at about 3% of global headcount. EA's memo gives no headcount at all, and promises that affected staff will be treated with care and respect, with some able to explore other roles inside the company. That is the standard line, and it does little for the people in Edmonton who just learned their workplace is being shut down.
The Rest of the EA Reshuffle
Mass Effect was not the only casualty. EA is pausing Project Lotus, the codename for a new Sims game, so the team can put its weight behind Project Evergreen, which the company says needs more time to reach its full vision. skate., which is still online after launching in 2025, is getting a more focused, smaller team and a very clear roadmap, which in plain English means layoffs at the studio and a lower ceiling for the game. In action-adventure, EA says it will concentrate on fewer simultaneous large-scale projects after Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game, both of which are confirmed to still be coming. GameSpot also notes the Black Panther game was already canceled earlier. My read is that fewer simultaneous projects is a polite way of saying more cancellations are likely, though EA has not named any.
Not everything in the memo is a cut, and EA made sure to bury the bad news between the good. EA Sports is described as operating from a position of strength, with a social-first open-world American football experience codenamed Project Gridiron and a Fight Night revival in pre-production after a 15 year break. On the shooter side, Battlefield 6 is called a success, Apex Legends gets new multiplayer modes over the next few years, and Respawn and DICE will collaborate on a future project that EA did not name. Variety's headline calls it Star Wars: Battlefront 3, and GameSpot says many people believe that is the target, but that is reporting and speculation, not an EA confirmation. If it is Battlefront, EA just traded a studio that made story-driven RPGs for a studio pairing that makes shooters, which tells you where the money is.
How Fans and the Industry Are Reacting
The reaction is grief with a large side of anger. CD Projekt's Michal Nowakowski posted that BioWare is a massive part of the Polish studio's history: they got to know each other when CD Projekt localized and sold the Baldur's Gate games in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, and BioWare later lent its engine for the first Witcher game. His summary was very sad for the people affected, but also sad to see a legendary brand go down, and not a great day in the games industry. That is a competitor talking about a studio that helped build his own company, and it carries more weight than most of the noise on the timeline.
Scrolling live search on X shortly after the news broke, I saw three camps. The biggest is plain mourning from people who grew up on Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The second blames EA management and the new owners, with plenty of users arguing years of meddling made today's outcome inevitable. The third says the BioWare they loved disappeared long ago, so the closure hurts the developers more than the brand. There is also political noise about the Saudi owners and inclusive storytelling. GameSpot notes that longtime BioWare writer Patrick Weekes, laid off in 2025, speculated the new owners might want to avoid that kind of content, but that is speculation, and EA's memo gives no such reason. I only sampled a slice of the conversation, so treat this as a mood and not a poll.
The CriticalPixel Take
This is how a leveraged buyout works. GameSpot's rundown lays out the setup: the Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners took EA private in a $55 billion deal that was the largest leveraged buyout ever, which means it comes loaded with debt that somebody has to service. Ampere Analysis said before the deal closed that EA might cut excess spending and rationalize its workforce, and Circana's Mat Piscatella warned that acquired companies in these deals rarely fare well. So today is not a surprise, it is the opening invoice. BioWare was the easiest line item to cut: a team of fewer than 100 people in Edmonton, working on early development of a game that was years from shipping, at a company whose most recent BioWare release was Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
What annoys me most is the packaging. EA wraps the death of a legendary studio in a memo that is mostly about growth in Asia, social-first football and transformation, and then says it does not take the decision lightly in the same paragraph where it announces the closure. Nothing in the memo says what happens to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age brands, which EA still owns, and nothing says anyone will try to find a buyer for the studio or keep the team together. If you are a fan hoping for a rescue, there is no sign of one in anything EA published today. If you are a developer in Edmonton, the message is that your craft was a rounding error against a debt schedule.
Keep an eye on three things from here. EA says it will discuss its direction at the next Global Town Hall in November, which is where the harder questions about the remaining studios should come up. The Respawn and DICE project is still unnamed, so the Battlefront talk stays unconfirmed until EA says otherwise. And Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game now carry the weight of the entire action-adventure strategy, with no dates given for either. BioWare's back catalog stays on the shelves, but the studio that made it is gone, and that is a loss no corporate memo is going to talk anyone out of feeling.
Sources
EA: Building EA's Next Chapter
Variety: Electronic Arts Laying Off 3% of Employees, BioWare Shutting Down
GameSpot on X: EA planning to shut down BioWare