BioWare Is Closing, and Early Work on the Next Mass Effect Ends With It
BioWare announced on social media that it is closing after more than three decades, and that early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending. The name carries weight for what it made: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Ars Technica reports that the announcement came minutes after a Bloomberg story detailing 400 job cuts across BioWare's parent company, Electronic Arts, including 50 at BioWare, based on a person familiar with the plans.
The wording is almost generous: three decades of shared adventures first, then the unfinished project in the same sentence. The reported numbers put the closure in a more ordinary frame, fifty jobs at a studio counted inside four hundred across a parent company.
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There is something bleakly tidy about the phrasing. Thirty-odd years and an unfinished project get one clause each, as if a studio and its next game were the same size of thing.
A studio isn't its back catalogue, but the back catalogue is what people will keep arguing about. Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic are still the thing the name means; the argument outlives the office.
And fifty of those reported cuts land at the studio itself, which is why this reads as a BioWare story rather than a line in a spreadsheet. That's the number with a face on it.