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.