BioWare is closing. The studio announced on social media on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 that it is shutting down and that early development on the next Mass Effect is ending, Video Games Chronicle reported. The new Mass Effect had been announced in 2020, with very little shown since.
400 jobs at EA
The closure is part of wider cuts at Electronic Arts. According to an internal memo reported by Bloomberg and Variety, EA is cutting about 400 jobs, roughly 3% of its workforce. About 50 of them are at BioWare, whose office in Edmonton, Canada, will close. Mobilegamer.biz adds that:
- Work on a new Sims game, codenamed Project Lotus, is being halted in favour of another Sims project, Project Evergreen
- The Skate team is also affected
In the memo, EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber said the company had taken a hard look at its business over the past several months.
The context: a sale with a lot of debt
The cuts come two months after EA’s 55 billion dollar take-private by a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund was completed. According to VGC, the buyout left EA with about 18 billion dollars in debt and around 1.8 billion dollars a year in interest, and the company had told investors it would cut 700 million dollars in annual costs.
Thirty years of BioWare
Founded in 1995 by Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk and bought by EA in 2007, BioWare made some of the best-loved role-playing games of all time:
- Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
- The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series
Its last game was Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024. EA has not said what will happen to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age brands. It says it will keep investing in its sports games, Apex Legends, Battlefield and action-adventure projects such as the next Star Wars Jedi game and Marvel’s Iron Man.
Update: fans have since launched a Save Mass Effect petition that passed 200,000 signatures.
This article was written with AI assistance from the sources linked above.
