EA closed BioWare. The lesson for players is about how big games get funded.

On October 21, Electronic Arts announced it would close BioWare — the Edmonton studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age and, decades ago, Baldur’s Gate — and discontinue development of the next Mass Effect game, which had been announced in 2020. The Washington Post called it the end of “30 years of influential, genre-defining games.” Bloomberg reported the closure as part of around 400 job cuts, about 3% of EA’s staff.

EA’s stated reasoning, per the Post’s coverage, was that it would concentrate investment on fewer large-scale projects. Forbes’s Paul Tassi supplied the context the statement left out: BioWare was coming off three high-profile, hugely expensive misses — Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Grief first

Let’s not skip past the human part. A studio that taught a generation of players that a game could be about choices, companions and consequences has been shut, and the people who made it are out of work. For anyone who grew up on the Normandy, this lands harder than a line in a quarterly update. It should.

Then the arithmetic

But there’s a lesson here, and it isn’t that EA is uniquely cold. It’s about how big games are funded now. A studio like BioWare makes one enormous game every several years. Each one costs so much that it has to be a hit; a miss doesn’t just lose money, it consumes the runway for the next attempt. Three misses in a row, and the maths says what the memo said: fewer, bigger bets, placed elsewhere.

That model is brutal because it has no tolerance for the middle. A game that’s good-not-great, loved by a million people rather than ten million, counts as a failure. BioWare’s recent output was arguably in that middle, and the middle is where the model kills you.

What it means for the games you love

Two things, we think.

First, the franchises aren’t dead; the studio is. EA owns Mass Effect and Dragon Age and will, eventually, do something with them. Whether that something is made by people who understand what made them special is a different question, and the answer is usually no.

Second, and more practically: the market signal that keeps a certain kind of game alive is people buying it at launch. The thirty-dollar-sale habit — the one most of us have — is rational for our wallets and corrosive for the studios making the games we say we want. If you want character-driven, choice-heavy single-player games to keep existing, the lever you control is buying them when they’re new, from whoever is still making them.

The era-ending part

Tassi calls it the end of an era, and he’s right in a specific sense. BioWare was a studio defined by a genre it largely invented. The industry that closed it is one where that kind of specialisation is a liability: you’re either a platform or a portfolio bet. There’s no comfort in that for the people in Edmonton. There is, for the rest of us, a reason to pay a little more attention to who is making the games we play — and to pay for them while they still can.