BioWare Shutting Down: EA Cancels New Mass Effect, Cuts 400 Jobs — Edmonton Studio Closes

For millions of gamers, the studio that defined what a role-playing game could be is gone. On Wednesday, Electronic Arts confirmed it is closing BioWare — the Edmonton-born developer behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — and cancelling the next Mass Effect game, which had been in early development since it was teased at The Game Awards in December 2020.

The news landed in an internal memo from EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber titled "Building EA's Next Chapter." About 400 EA employees are losing their jobs — roughly three per cent of the publisher's workforce — including around 50 at BioWare, Bloomberg reported via Reuters. BioWare confirmed the closure itself on social media, writing: "For more than 30 years, BioWare has been more than a studio. It has been a home for storytellers, developers, and the players who brought our worlds to life. Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending."

CTV News in Edmonton framed it as the end of a 31-year chapter for the city's video game industry. It is hard to overstate what BioWare meant to this country's tech scene: it was Alberta's only AAA studio, and arguably Canada's most famous game developer of all time.

How a legend fell

BioWare was founded in Edmonton in 1995 by three doctors who liked making games more than practising medicine. The hits came fast: Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic — and then Mass Effect in 2007, which turned cinematic choice-driven storytelling into the genre's gold standard. EA acquired the studio that same year, and for a while the money made everything bigger.

Then came the stumbles. Anthem, the 2019 live-service shooter, flopped so badly it killed the company's appetite for that entire model. Mass Effect: Andromeda never recovered from its infamously glitchy launch. And Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in October 2024, reached about 1.5 million players — roughly 50 per cent below EA's expectations, Dot Esports reported. After Veilguard, EA moved developers to other teams and cut others, leaving fewer than 100 people at BioWare, and eventually just a skeleton crew of around 50 working on the next Mass Effect. When a publisher calls a project "early development" six years after announcing it, you already know how the sentence ends.

The $55 billion buyout behind the cuts

The closure did not happen in a vacuum. In August, EA was taken private in a $55 billion leveraged buyout led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners — the private equity firm of Jared Kushner, the U.S. president's son-in-law. As Kotaku reported, the deal saddled EA with $18 billion in debt, and executives promised investors $700 million in annual cost savings. Bone-deep cuts were always coming; BioWare just happened to be the bone.

Tinson and Weber told staff EA will focus on fewer, bigger bets: Apex Legends, a new Battlefield 6, sports franchises like Madden, a new Star Wars Jedi game and Marvel's Iron Man. A Sims project codenamed Project Lotus is being "paused." There was no mention of trying to sell BioWare or the Mass Effect rights to another publisher. The Edmonton office closes, full stop.

What this means for Canadian players

Honestly? This stings more north of the border. BioWare was the proof that you could build a world-class studio in Edmonton and ship games that defined a medium. Its alumni are everywhere in the industry, and its influence on how games tell stories is permanent. But influence does not pay quarterly dividends, and a debt-loaded EA has no patience for a studio that needed five years to ship a single game that underperformed.

One open question: Amazon's Mass Effect television adaptation, in development for Prime Video. Nothing in Wednesday's announcement addressed it, and EA said nothing about transferring the cancelled game to another team. For now, the franchise exists only as old discs, memories, and a very uncertain TV pilot.

The 31-year run produced some of the best-written games ever made. That record belongs to Edmonton forever, whatever EA's balance sheet says.

Sources

• Polygon: BioWare officially shutting down and new Mass Effect canceled
• Kotaku: EA to shut down BioWare and cancel the next Mass Effect game
• Dot Esports: BioWare shutting down, next Mass Effect canceled by EA
• CTV News: BioWare, Edmonton-based video game company, shutting down

Photo: Mass Effect cosplayers at DragonCon 2017 — Terry Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.