// KOTAKU — GAMING
EA To Shut Down BioWare And Cancel The Next Mass Effect Game
Bloomberg reports that Electronic Arts will layoff roughly 400 employees, shut down its BioWare studio, and cancel the next game in the Mass Effect series. BioWare confirmed in a post on social media that it would be shutting down.
“Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.”
The closure is the latest casualty of parent company Electronic Arts going private in a massive $55 billion buyout by the Saudi Arabian private investment fund with help from Affinity Partners, a private equity fund owned by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. As part of the buyout, EA was saddled with $18 billion in debt and its board of executives promised investors $700 million in annual cost savings which has resulted in several rounds of bone–cutting that now includes a studio that was once the jewel of its narrative video game business.
EA acquired the studio in 2007. In 2011, BioWare took its first crack at the live-service genre with the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic and again with Anthem in 2019. Anthem would prove to be a financial failure. The game was plagued by a contentious development, finally launching as a buggy mess nobody liked. In the wake of Anthem‘s monumental flop, BioWare was able to reverse course on its plans for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to include live-service and multiplayer elements, instead releasing it as a single-player game. But returning Dragon Age to its single-player roots was not enough.
BioWare has been repeatedly rocked by layoffs both before and after the launch of Veilguard, sales of which EA said had failed to meet expectations. Now the studio known for Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and more is gone.
In addition to announcing the shutdown of BioWare, a letter to EA staff also included the news that it would cancel a project related to The Sims franchise code-named Project Lotus, to instead focus on another project code-named Evergreen.
EA plans to focus on its sports game offerings, Apex Legends, and its Marvel and Star Wars projects.
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