BioWare is closing.
The Edmonton video game studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic announced Wednesday that it’s shutting down.
“BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending,” the studio said in a [post to fans]([BioWare statement link]).
The closure ends one of Edmonton’s biggest success stories in the video game industry.
What happened
BioWare’s owner, Electronic Arts, announced the closure Wednesday, Oct. 21, as part of company-wide cuts
EA is laying off about 400 people, roughly 3% of its workforce, according to Bloomberg. About 50 of those jobs were at BioWare, the team working on the next Mass Effect game.
That game is now cancelled. EA first teased it at The Game Awards in 2020, with a short trailer that ended on a familiar N7 symbol.
In a letter to staff, EA chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber said the company had “taken a hard look at our business” over the past several months.
BioWare said its focus now is on supporting its team “through this transition.” It thanked players and called the studio “a home for storytellers, developers, and the players who brought our worlds to life.”
Three doctors from Edmonton
BioWare started in 1995 with three University of Alberta medical graduates: Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip.
They were physicians who wanted to make games. Their first was Shattered Steel, a 1996 mech shooter.
BioWare’s breakthrough came in 1998 with Baldur’s Gate. It sold more than two million copies and made BioWare one of the biggest names in role-playing games, from an office in Edmonton.
The games
Over the next two decades, BioWare built some of the most loved games ever made:
Baldur’s Gate (1998) and Baldur’s Gate II (2000)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
Jade Empire (2005)
Mass Effect (2007), Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012)
Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and its sequels
Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017)
Anthem (2019)
Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), its last game
BioWare’s games were known for choices that mattered. Players could shape the story, build relationships with their crew and live with the consequences across a whole trilogy. Mass Effect 2 still regularly shows up on lists of the best games of all time.
From 600 people to 50
At its peak, BioWare had about 600 employees.
EA acquired BioWare in 2007. The studio kept releasing major games, but its later projects struggled to match the success of its earlier ones.
Mass Effect: Andromeda was poorly received in 2017. Anthem, an online shooter, struggled after its 2019 launch and was eventually abandoned. In 2023, BioWare cut about 50 staff.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard came out in late 2024. In January 2025, EA said the game had reached about 1.5 million players, roughly half of what it expected. BioWare went through another round of “restructuring” weeks later and moved most of its remaining staff onto Mass Effect.
By this week, about 50 people were left.
What BioWare meant to Edmonton
BioWare was more than a game studio. It proved that some of the biggest games in the world could be made in Edmonton.
In 2019, it moved into three floors of Epcor Tower downtown, about 75,000 square feet, with its own motion-capture studio and an arcade.
For three decades, the studio trained developers, writers, artists and actors who stayed in the city. Many went on to start or join other studios. Beamdog, the Edmonton company that remastered Baldur’s Gate, was founded by former BioWare developers.
BioWare drew talent to Edmonton from around the world, and it gave local kids who grew up playing its games a real reason to believe they could make them here.
That’s what the city loses this week.
“A deep loss”
Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack called Mass Effect his favourite game of all time. He said BioWare changed how stories are told in games, and that the closure comes down to the economics of the industry, not Edmonton.
Mark Meer, the Edmonton actor who voiced Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect trilogy, called it a deep loss for Edmonton, for Canada and for the industry. Meer’s voice work with BioWare goes back to Baldur’s Gate II.
What happens to Mass Effect and Dragon Age?
EA owns both franchises. It hasn’t said what it will do with them.
Amazon has had a Mass Effect TV series in development since November 2024, with Daniel Casey attached as writer and executive producer. Amazon hasn’t said whether the closure changes anything. The show is a separate project from the cancelled game.
Star Wars: The Old Republic, the online game BioWare built in Austin, Texas, is now run by a separate company called Broadsword. It isn’t affected.
The bigger picture at EA
The cuts come a few months after EA was bought in a $55 billion deal by a group that includes Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners.
BioWare wasn’t the only project cut. EA also cancelled a Sims game code-named Project Lotus and downsized the team behind skate.
EA says it will keep investing in its sports games, Apex Legends, Battlefield, the next Star Wars Jedi game and a Marvel’s Iron Man game.
The end of an era
For 31 years, a studio in Edmonton made games that millions of people around the world played, replayed and argued about.
“What generations of BioWare built together is something to celebrate and remember,” the studio said.
Sources
BioWare, closure statement, Oct. 21, 2026:
Electronic Arts, statement on company changes, Oct. 21, 2026:
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