Electronic Arts cut about 400 jobs on October 21, 2026, roughly 3% of its workforce, and about fifty of them were at BioWare. The Edmonton studio is gone: the BioWare shutdown, thirty years after its founding, takes the next Mass Effect down with it. The figure comes from Bloomberg, and BioWare confirmed the news itself.
What Bloomberg counts in the BioWare shutdown
The detail of the Bloomberg report comes from Game Developer (Bryant Francis, October 21). Of the roughly 400 layoffs, about 50 concern BioWare, the studio’s remaining staff according to the article’s subhead, and the Edmonton site is closing. A new Mass Effect was under way, now cancelled.
The studio announced its own end in a public message: “There is nothing easy about writing those words.” It speaks first of its team, “who put their hearts into these games.” PC Gamer ran the same story under “RIP BioWare”, calling it a legendary RPG developer.
Thirty years from Baldur’s Gate to The Veilguard
BioWare was born in 1995 in Edmonton, founded by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip. Game Developer recalls its beginnings with Shattered Steel in 1997, then Baldur’s Gate in 1998, an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire followed, both well received, then the two series that made the studio: Mass Effect in 2007 and Dragon Age: Origins in 2009. EA bought BioWare in 2007.
What followed was harder. After Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014, the studio struggled while its publisher pushed live-service games. Game Developer relies on Mark Darrah, a former executive producer. Mass Effect: Andromeda did not win back the goodwill of earlier entries, and Anthem, in 2019, sold about 5 million copies before being shut down, according to the same article. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in 2024, changed nature several times during development, from a single-player game to a live-service one and back to single-player. After it, EA had announced a new Mass Effect. That is the one that disappears.
What EA drops, what it keeps
Bloomberg describes a sort much wider than BioWare. Project Lotus, a Sims game, is cancelled. Project Evergreen, at Maxis, becomes a priority. At Full Circle, the Skate team, resources are redirected to other projects: the game stays in development, but VGC reports “many” departures. Respawn and DICE are finally set to work together on a new game, “likely” a Star Wars Battlefront.
In an internal letter, COO David Tinson and Cam Weber, head of studios, say they made these decisions after several months of a “hard look at the business”. They speak of deliberate choices to align talent and investment with the biggest growth opportunities. EA, for its part, had announced the return of Fight Night the day before. Nothing in the sources we consulted links the two announcements.
The new owner’s first big decision
The $55 billion buyout of EA, led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, closed less than three months ago. The BioWare shutdown is therefore one of the first big decisions made under this new owner. Game Developer recalls that developers had criticized the deal, and that employees said they had received only vague assurances despite the promise of independent management.
The financial context was already known. Our August 14 article put at 1.8 billion the interest EA has to pay every year, and announced 700 million in cuts to come. That 700 million figure is our article’s, not Bloomberg’s or EA’s. The link between those savings and the BioWare shutdown is not established. We had also noted that the Saudi fund was already considering an EA-Savvy merger, a lead and not an announcement.
For players: no Mass Effect to wait for
For players, the BioWare shutdown means no new Mass Effect is in development at EA. As for the licenses, no source we consulted settles the legal fate of Mass Effect or Dragon Age, and we do not claim to.
Reactions followed across the industry. GamesRadar reports mourning from developers at CD Projekt, the studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077: “Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 shaped my imagination and the desire to create games.”
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