EA Is Shutting Down BioWare, and the Next Mass Effect Is Cancelled

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026

BioWare is closing. Electronic Arts told its employees on Wednesday that it is shutting down the Edmonton studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, ending 31 years of role-playing history — and cancelling the next Mass Effect game in the process.

The news came in a letter to staff from EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber, who said executives had “taken a hard look at our business” over the past several months. Reuters reported that EA plans to close BioWare and its Edmonton studio to focus on more lucrative projects, and the company has since shared the letter publicly on its own website.

“As we focus on these larger opportunities, we’ve had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect,” Tinson and Weber wrote. “We’ve made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace.”

The cancelled game was the untitled next Mass Effect, announced in 2020 and still, six years later, in early development with a small team. It is the last project BioWare had in production. With it gone, EA concluded there was nothing left for the studio to make.

About 400 jobs cut across EA — roughly 50 at BioWare

The closure is one piece of a much larger round of cuts. According to Bloomberg, which first reported the scale of the layoffs through a person familiar with the company’s plans, about 400 EA employees are being laid off — roughly 3 percent of the publisher’s total staff. About 50 of those jobs are at BioWare; the rest are spread across the wider company. Reuters, Polygon and GameSpot all carried the same figures from Bloomberg’s reporting.

That distinction matters, because it is easy to misread this as a 400-person studio being wiped out. BioWare had already been cut down to a fraction of its former size through earlier rounds of layoffs and departures. What EA is eliminating company-wide is about 400 roles. What it is eliminating at BioWare is the studio itself. Reuters reported that EA said it would help affected employees explore other opportunities inside the company.

“BioWare is closing”

BioWare confirmed its own fate publicly, in a statement posted to its social media accounts on Wednesday. “BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending,” the studio said, after more than three decades of work. The statement thanked the players who had made the studio’s worlds their own — the fans who, in BioWare’s words, played the games, debated their choices and fell in love with the characters. “From all of us at BioWare, thank you for being the most meaningful part of our story.”

It is a short goodbye for a studio that defined its genre. BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Alberta, in February 1995 by three newly graduated medical doctors, and built its name on licensed role-playing games — Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic — before creating worlds of its own: Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Electronic Arts bought the studio’s parent company in 2007, and for a run of years BioWare was the most celebrated RPG house in the business, releasing the original Mass Effect trilogy and Dragon Age: Origins to enormous acclaim.

A long slide, then the buyout

The second decade was harder. Mass Effect: Andromeda, released in 2017, met a mixed response and put the series on ice; the remastered Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021 was a reminder of how much the trilogy still meant to players. Anthem, the studio’s 2019 live-service gamble, failed to meet expectations, and 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard — a decade in the making — also missed EA’s sales expectations, as Polygon noted in its report on the closure.

The corporate ground shifted underneath all of it. EA was taken private in a $55 billion deal led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, which closed in August and loaded the company with roughly $18 billion in debt. GameSpot reported that EA told investors in March it planned to save some $700 million following the leveraged buyout, and Polygon estimates the publisher has already laid off about 970 people over the past two years. Wednesday’s letter is what that arithmetic looks like when it reaches a beloved studio.

What EA is keeping

The same letter drew the map of what survives. EA will concentrate on fewer, larger bets: its sports games, Apex Legends, Battlefield — Tinson and Weber called Battlefield 6 “a great success” and promised heavy investment in Apex — plus the next Star Wars Jedi game, Marvel’s Iron Man, and what Polygon described as a new Star Wars Battlefront game co-developed by Respawn and DICE.

BioWare is not the only loss in the letter. A Sims project codenamed Project Lotus is being paused, with its resources redirected to another Sims project codenamed Project Evergreen, and the team behind Skate at Full Circle is being downsized and restructured into a smaller studio. Game Informer’s report on the letter framed it plainly: sports, shooters and Star Wars continue; almost everything else is being weighed.

No new home for Mass Effect or Dragon Age

Nothing in Wednesday’s announcements pointed either of BioWare’s signature series toward another studio, a buyer, or a future. For now, Mass Effect and Dragon Age sit on EA’s shelf alongside the studio that created them.

That is the real shape of this story. EA’s letter talks about “deliberate choices” — aligning talent and investment where it sees the greatest opportunities for growth. BioWare spent 31 years making the opposite argument: that the choices belonged to the player, and that a game could be built out of nothing but conversations, companions and consequences. It made that argument better than anyone else in the medium, for longer than almost anyone. On Wednesday, the spreadsheet won.