EA is cutting about 400 jobs, roughly 3% of its entire staff, and closing BioWare, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, Bloomberg reports. The job numbers, including about 50 at BioWare, come from a person familiar with EA’s plans.
In a letter to staff, chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber write that “over the past several months, we’ve taken a hard look at our business.” The letter says EA is pausing development on Project Lotus to prioritize Project Evergreen for The Sims.
The skate. studio is getting “a more focused, smaller team.” Respawn and DICE, meanwhile, will team up on a future project for EA’s shooter business.
The cuts come less than three months after EA went private. Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners closed their $55 billion (about Php 3.5 trillion) purchase of the company on August 4th.
BioWare is closing after 31 years
EA’s letter says a small team at BioWare was in early development on the next Mass Effect. EA decided not to go ahead with it, so it’s closing the studio and its Edmonton office. “BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly,” Tinson and Weber write.
BioWare told players on X with a short letter of its own. It runs through the studio’s games, from Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Anthem, before it gets to the line nobody wanted to read.
Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.
— BioWare (@bioware) October 21, 2026
Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, three doctors who studied together at the University of Alberta, started BioWare in 1995 in a small room in Zeschuk’s basement. EA agreed to buy the studio in 2007.
In January 2025, EA said Dragon Age engaged about 1.5 million players in its latest quarter, nearly 50% below its expectations. A week later, BioWare said that with Dragon Age: The Veilguard out, only a core team would stay on the next Mass Effect, and it moved many of its people to other teams at EA.
Whatever you think of EA, this is bad news for the games industry, and a bad time to be a fan of the story-driven games BioWare made its name on.
