EA Adds BioWare to Its Closure List

The gaming industry over the last couple of years has been brutal, with studios and games shutting down and games cancelled all over. BioWare is the newest closure, and frankly I’m not surprised they were next on the chopping block. I wrote in 2025 “EA Goes Private: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” and said the studio was under threat of closure. Okay, I hinted at that. Yesterday it finally happened, and the early Mass Effect game that was being worked on is now cancelled. EA is well known for killing studios, and when it went private with a huge debt pile it needed to save costs. It’s not hard to feel numb at this news. I was expecting it, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I was never a fan of EA because of their poor behaviour and ugly business practices. Loads of other people felt the same, which is how they ended up with “Worst Company in America” more than once. Now a couple of my favourite studios have been buried alive by them.

I never really was a fan of BioWare until much later on. I think Mass Effect 1-3 are brilliant games. Granted, I didn’t play much of it, but I loved it. After 30 years, it’s over. BioWare was already down to about 100 people from 200 just two years ago, with its peak being over 400, and after Dragon Age: The Veilguard didn’t hit the mark it was gutted. Now around 50 more jobs go at BioWare, along with 350 across the rest of EA. It wasn’t just one game but three failures, with impossible expectations and high budgets.

I think that’s the bigger problem. At some point the industry has to rethink its business model and lower budgets and expectations of what a game should look like. Highly detailed games suck up so much time and money, and it needs good management, which is lacking when people get treated like freelancers and the expertise and experience walks out the door. In many ways the games industry is similar to Hollywood, which is pumping out sequels over new stories. They don’t always find an audience, yet new stories sometimes hit the jackpot. We’ve already seen a long list of smaller titles becoming major success stories. Budgets have ballooned while returns are falling. I’ll probably write more on that.

I expect EA to focus on live service and yearly sports releases: Madden, EA Sports FC, Battlefield with DICE, and I can’t remember what else. Star Wars: Battlefront 3 is rumoured at DICE. I’m expecting more job losses, and the library looks weak, a bit like Ubisoft: a few titles, and once those fail they’re in trouble. We’ve seen publishers go under before. THQ was a licensing machine making third-party games until that market disappeared, and EA and Ubisoft could be next. Even Xbox feels shaky to me, and honestly Nintendo is the only big one that looks safe right now.

Selling off IPs or studios doesn’t look like the way out either. Some have been sold and most have been lost, and anyone who wants an IP will have to pay a high price, even if the current owners do nothing with it. Companies hold on hoping they’re worth something, but with no releases they’re worth far less. I’m not certain it would even make money to begin with. The same goes for movies/TV and music, so that’s probably another post.

I know I shouldn’t be writing another blog post when I’ve already got everything for this month sorted. I just needed to vent, I guess. I’m so done with what’s happening in gaming right now. The future isn’t with these big companies but with smaller studios, AA and indies.