Electronic Arts is making big cuts, including laying off staff and shutting down storied developer BioWare, the studio behind the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. The closure of BioWare means that the next Mass Effect game, colloquially known as Mass Effect 5, which was announced in 2020, has been canceled.
In a letter to staff on Wednesday, EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber told employees that executives have “taken a hard look at our business” and will focus on the publisher’s proven hits, including Apex Legends, Battlefield, and sports games like Madden, Bloomberg reports.
According to Bloomberg, around 400 EA employees are being laid off, including about 50 at BioWare.
EA plans to continue developing a new Star Wars Jedi title, Marvel’s Iron Man, and what sounds like a new Star Wars Battlefront game, with Respawn and DICE co-developing the new Star Wars shooter. EA is “pausing development” on a Sims game codenamed Project Lotus and will refocus efforts on a different project in the franchise codenamed Project Evergreen.
Official BioWare social media accounts confirmed the news of the studio’s fate publicly.
“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,” the developer said in a statement. “Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.”
In their memo to employees, Tinson and Weber broke the news about BioWare as follows: “As we focus on these larger opportunities, we’ve had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect,” the executives said. “We’ve made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly.”
Elsewhere in the memo, Tinson and Weber called Battlefield 6 “a great success” and said EA would “invest heavily in Apex over the next few years by introducing brand-new gameplay modes in multijugador, and other new experiences, to expand the universe.”
BioWare has struggled under EA in recent years
BioWare was founded in 1995 and developed landmark role-playing games such as the original Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The studio was acquired by EA in 2007, and produced multiple hits in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises.
The cancellation of the next Mass Effect comes as little surprise, given the pace of development on that sci-fi game, which was said to still be in early development. BioWare’s last major release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, missed sales expectations. The most recent new Mass Effect game was 2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda, which released to mixed response from critics and players. BioWare released a remastered collection of the first three Mass Effect games under the title Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021.
Electronic Arts was acquired and went fully private in August in a joint private equity deal by the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake. The all-cash transaction was valued at $55 billion, and saddled EA with approximately $18 billion in debt. After the Saudi buyout of EA, the company said it would focus on cost-cutting measures to reduce annual costs by $700 million. A large portion of that plan was tied to “organizational efficiencies,” which amount to $170 million in cost savings that are now translating to mass layoffs. Electronic Arts is estimated to have already laid off an estimated 970 people over the past two years.
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