EA Shuts Down BioWare & Cancels the Next Mass Effect Game
Electronic Arts is closing BioWare, the Canadian studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, ending a run of more than 30 years. The news came on Wednesday, October 21, in an internal memo to EA staff from company presidents Cam Weber and David Tinson, followed shortly by a farewell post from the studio itself. The closure is part of a wider restructuring that will cut roughly 400 jobs, or about 3% of EA's global workforce. Reportedly, around 50 of those positions are at BioWare.
The move also ends work on the next Mass Effect. EA said a small BioWare team had been in early development on the game, but the publisher chose to drop the project and shut the studio down, including its office in Edmonton, Alberta. "We do not take this decision lightly," Weber and Tinson wrote in the memo.
BioWare's own goodbye post on X confirmed the closure and thanked the fans who debated their choices, fell for the characters, and made the studio's worlds their own over three decades.
This is EA's first major restructuring since they became a private company. In August, a group of investors led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund bought EA for $55 billion. The deal left the company with around $20 billion in debt, raising concerns that layoffs and other cuts could follow.
According to an internal memo, EA spent the past several months reviewing their operations and spending. The company now seems to focus less on single-player RPGs and more on their biggest franchises, including sports games, Apex Legends, and Battlefield, alongside upcoming Star Wars and Iron Man titles. Respawn Entertainment and DICE will also work together on a new project, reportedly another Star Wars Battlefront game.
BioWare isn't the only team affected. Full Circle, the studio behind the Skate reboot, is being cut down to a smaller team, and a Sims project has been put on hold. EA leadership reportedly indicated that more cuts to staff and projects could be coming.
For longtime fans, the closure caps a rough decade. BioWare was founded in 1995 and built its name on Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and Dragon Age before EA bought the studio's parent company in 2007. The recent years were harder. Anthem, a live-service shooter that launched in February 2019, fell short of EA's sales targets, and its servers went dark for good on January 12, 2026.
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