End of BioWare
EA is straight-up shutting down BioWare. From the farewell letter (source):
For more than 30 years, BioWare has been more than a studio. It has been a home for storytellers, developers, and the players who brought our worlds to life.
Baldur’s Gate. Neverwinter Nights. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Dragon Age. Mass Effect. Anthem.
Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.
There is nothing easy about writing those words. Our focus right now is on our incredibly talented team who put their hearts into these games, and supporting one another through this transition.
What generations of BioWare built together is something to celebrate and remember. These games became so much more because you played them, debated your choices, fell in love with the characters, and made these worlds your own.
From all of us at BioWare, thank you for being the most meaningful part of our story.
So, yeah, no more Mass Effect 4. Chances are that we never see entries in these franchises ever again.
There is a lot of blame to go around. The immediate villain is EA and their new private equity masters, as they were the ones to pull the trigger. At the same time, BioWare’s last three releases were Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, and Dragon Age: Veilguard. How many studios could survive a string of three commercial failures in a row? If BioWare was independent, they would already be dead.
“It was EA’s focus on live-service and monetization that ruined BioWare.” That sort of thing doesn’t help, but have you read anything about how BioWare was “developing” these games? Andromeda had 4 years of wildly varying design direction where anyone struggled to find the fun, and then was crunched into its final form in 18 months. Anthem? Even worse. Veilguard? Wouldn’t you know it, crunched in 18 months. When I read these stories, it’s hard to blame EA at all. If anything, I came away with the thought that EA should have stepped earlier in with a firmer hand.
To be more fair to BioWare, in the post-mortem, everything may actually have been a slow death from Frostbite, e.g. the game engine EA mandated all its studios use. In every BioWare story, including the successful Dragon Age: Inquisition, design and iteration was constantly stymied by Frostbite bugs, lack of knowledge, and general inappropriateness as an engine. If you have to “hack together” an inventory or save system in your RPG, what are you even doing? It’s still possible that the game directors and executives in charge dither for years on the final design, but at least it may have been easier to bring the final vision to life with something else.
Alas.
Someone else did get it wrong.
Posted on October 22, 2026, in Commentary and tagged Anthem, Bioware, Capitalist Dystopian Hellscape, Dragon Age: the Veilguard, EA, Mass Effect: Andromeda. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
Having worked at a software/engineering studio, I can tell you that mucking about with an engine not designed for what BioWare was forced into using probably added about a year or more into the development cycle. From my perspective that idiot VP from EA who shoved Frostbyte into everything was akin to a force multiplier: he made a bad situation much worse. That’s not to absolve BioWare of any wrongdoing; to be certain there’s plenty of blame to go around. The thing is, if they had a stable engine that did what they wanted it to do, there would have been a lot fewer bugs overall.
I also blame BioWare’s OG owners for selling out to EA, who already had a reputation for destroying studios, and for leadership not having a clear plan for Anthem and Veilguard from the start. Yes, yes, EA demanding live service games was also a terrible idea (see the “selling out to EA” part), but BioWare did have experience in MMOs already courtesy of SWTOR, but leadership simply refused to utilize that expertise. That was a HUGE self-own from BioWare’s leadership, because in their arrogance they thought they knew better than the MMO team on how to build a live service game.
The thing is, Anthem ought to have been a good MMO-esque game. It had an interesting premise, an MMO feel to the gameplay, and a potentially compelling story. That failure is a cautionary tale for everybody, from executives down to the junior devs. Will anybody listen? Probably not, because the buyout allows EA’s executives and BioWare’s game leads to have a huge amount of plausible deniability. I feel worst for the rank and file, who likely saw the disasters coming a mile away but were powerless to do anything about it.
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Not sure if you already read the Shreier article on Anthem, but yeah, you nailed it. Not only was the Frostbite engine awful for RPGs, the team abandoned the hacks the Inquisition and Andromeda devs made and started new engine hacks from scratch. They ignored the SWTOR devs and committed the cardinal MMO sin of putting important plot/banter in group content. Hilariously, they had an entire cosmetic microtransaction system designed… but no lobby where players could show the gear off. One was added before launch, but c’mon. Literally no one ever brought that up in a meeting? Or someone did, and those in leadership positions ignored it?
I don’t often wonder about what “could have been” with games, because frankly these sort of stories make me question how we get games at all. Andromeda wasn’t great, and had a lot of issues at launch that got patched later. But… what if EA just let BioWare use the goddamn Unreal engine like they did with Mass Effect 1-3? Doesn’t solve leadership dithering on scope/trying to find the fun (shouldn’t they start with that?) for years, but we could be talking about a completely different timeline.
Larian made $1.2 billion with Baldur’s Gate 3, and the studio that created BG 1 & 2 and Dragon Age: Origin got shut down. Ain’t that a joke.
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“It was EA’s focus on live-service and monetization that ruined BioWare.” That sort of thing doesn’t help, but have you read anything about how BioWare was “developing” these games?
Poorly (though it’s suits-not-devs all the way down), but it’s also largely irrelevant to their demise. To bastardise a Martin Amis line, it’s all too easy to blame the buyout; nonetheless, I think we should blame the buyout.
If BioWare was independent, they would already be dead.
Certainly possible. On the other hand, if Larian were owned by SFD!EA, they would already be dead. Revenue of $0.2bn/y (accounting for BG3 dev time) vs $4.5bn/y MTX, which must rise further still to service the debt EA have taken on for the privilege of being bought out.
This whole debate about the theory of fun, etc. is like stag beetles wrestling in the shadow of a stomping foot.
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Ha! Very evocative turn of phrase.
It’s kind of an academic exercise at this point, but I agree, Larian would likely buckle under a similarly leveraged buyout. Can’t really spend six years building a game when you are hemorrhaging $1+ billion in interest alone.
It is interesting how all of it sort of highlights the foundational problem with videogaming as an “industry” more generally. Everyone agrees that BG3 was a meteoric success for the genre… but did they generate more revenue in sales than they would have had if Larian just put the dev salaries in the S&P500 for the same amount of time? That calculation is what Square Enix does any time one of its own releases is “below expectations.” In the context of a publicly traded company, well, it makes sense.
There are some Fortnites and Minecrafts and WoWs out there – along with sports franchises – making practically infinite money, and nearly everyone else is just making enough to fund the next game. Which would normally be fine, if these companies were not “investments.” The era of low interest rates is over though, and gaming in general is going to be squeezed by hardware prices this next generation until AAA almost ceases to exist.
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…if Larian just put the dev salaries in the S&P500 for the same amount of time? That calculation is what Square Enix does any time one of its own releases…
Sure. And, to be fair, Squeenix has been one of the more successful corps, although even they rely on some inane skin-selling nonsense between FFXIV expansions and the occasional vein of nostalgia paydirt.
But this spins further out into the general paradox: if everyone simply ceased all lesser-return activity and invested into the S&P500 then the social conditions for the S&P500 going up would crumble. A sane workforce, a sane customer base. The S&P500 owes something difficult to quantify but very real to BioWare, and to the local pottery studio, and the rest.
Marx was right, of course.
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