EA shuts down BioWare, cuts about 400 jobs in first moves since $55 billion buyout

Electronic Arts is shutting down BioWare, the 31-year-old studio behind "Mass Effect," "Dragon Age" and "Baldur's Gate," as part of a restructuring that will eliminate roughly 400 jobs, or about 3% of the company's global workforce. The decision, laid out in an internal memo posted to EA's corporate newsroom on Wednesday, is the first major corporate action at the video game publisher since it completed a $55 billion sale to a group of private investors in August.

The memo, signed by Cam Weber, EA's president and chief studios officer, and David Tinson, its president and chief operating officer, said a small team at BioWare had been in early development on a new "Mass Effect" installment. "We've made the decision not to move forward with this development," the executives wrote, "which means we're closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace." The memo did not give a specific number of affected employees, but it acknowledged that "others are difficult, especially for the people and teams across the company who are directly affected."

A 31-year run ends

BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1995 by three medical-school graduates, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip. It built its reputation on narrative-driven role-playing games, starting with "Baldur's Gate" in 1998 and continuing through "Neverwinter Nights," "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" and the "Dragon Age" and "Mass Effect" franchises. EA acquired the studio in 2007. Its most recent major release, the online shooter "Anthem," was a commercial disappointment; EA shut down that game's servers in January after years of trying to fix it.

EA's memo, titled "Building EA's Next Chapter," called BioWare "a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre," according to Variety, which reviewed the memo. The Wrap, citing a Bloomberg report, put the total reduction at about 400 positions, with roughly 50 of those coming from BioWare itself. EA last disclosed a global headcount of around 14,500 employees.

"BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre."

The first cuts since going private

The restructuring is EA's first since Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners completed their acquisition of the company on Aug. 4, paying $210 in cash per share in an all-cash deal valued at roughly $55 billion, according to EA's own announcement of the deal's closing. EA Chief Executive Andrew Wilson wrote in a separate message to staff that the company was "entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition." The agreement was first announced in September 2025 and approved by EA shareholders that December.

The buyout was financed with roughly $18 billion in new debt, and Bloomberg reported this spring that EA had pitched prospective lenders on about $700 million in annual savings, including roughly $170 million described internally as "organizational efficiencies." That debt load, and the interest payments that come with it, have fueled months of speculation inside and outside the company about where the new owners would cut first. A first, smaller round of cuts hit EA's Battlefield studios — Dice, Criterion, Ripple Effect and Motive — in March, which the company described at the time as a "realignment" rather than a reduction tied to the pending sale. Wednesday's memo is the first restructuring to land after the deal actually closed, and the first to claim an entire studio.

Wednesday's memo framed the cuts around three stated priorities: "Deepen Our Core," "Expand Our Reach" and "Transform Our Business." It described Battlefield 6 as "a great success" and said the shooter studios Respawn Entertainment and DICE would "collaborate on a future project," without naming it; Variety reported that multiple unnamed sources described the project as "Star Wars: Battlefront 3," a detail EA has not confirmed. The memo also said EA would keep investing in Marvel's "Iron Man" and an unannounced new "Star Wars Jedi" game, in a social-first, open-world American football project called "Project Gridiron," and in a "Fight Night" boxing title now in pre-production, while prioritizing a Sims effort called "Project Evergreen," pausing a second one called "Project Lotus," and shrinking its skateboarding game "Skate." to a smaller team.

Who is affected, and what comes next

The cuts land hardest on BioWare's roughly 50 remaining Edmonton employees, whose studio and office will close outright, and on unspecified staff elsewhere in EA's structure who make up the rest of the roughly 400 departures. EA's memo said affected employees would be supported "in exploring other opportunities within EA" and that further details would be addressed at the company's next global town hall, scheduled for November. The memo did not say whether severance terms would differ from those offered in EA's earlier 2026 cuts.

The restructuring follows a run of EA layoffs dating back to 2023 and comes roughly a week after Netflix's own content-leadership shake-up, part of a broader wave of entertainment-industry cost-cutting this autumn; the two companies' moves are unrelated. For BioWare veterans and role-playing-game fans, Wednesday's announcement ends any near-term prospect of a new "Mass Effect" game and effectively retires one of the industry's most storied studio names, following EA's earlier closures of Visceral Games and BioWare's own Montreal outpost. Whether EA revisits the "Mass Effect" or "Dragon Age" franchises elsewhere within the company was not addressed in Wednesday's memo.