This one genuinely sucks. After more than 30 years of making some of the RPGs that helped define the genre, BioWare is closing, and EA has also canceled the next Mass Effect game. Even if BioWare hasn’t felt quite like the same studio in recent years, seeing the name disappear altogether feels very different.

BioWare confirmed the news on October 21, 2026 with a short farewell looking back at everything from Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Anthem. Obviously, not every game was a winner, especially toward the end, but there aren’t many studios that can look back at a list like that.

EA Is Cutting Around 400 Jobs

BioWare’s closure comes as part of wider cuts at EA, with around 400 jobs reportedly going across the company and roughly 50 of those coming from BioWare. EA says it wants to focus more of its money and people on the games and franchises it believes have the strongest future, including Battlefield, Apex Legends, EA Sports, Marvel’s Iron Man, and the next Star Wars Jedi game.

Other teams haven’t escaped the cuts either. The Sims Project Lotus has been paused, rather than canceled as some early reports suggested, while the Skate team is also being reduced. But BioWare is obviously the name that stands out here. You don’t close the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age without it feeling like something much bigger than another round of layoffs.

The Next Mass Effect Is Canceled Too

Alongside BioWare itself, EA has ended development on the next Mass Effect. It was still relatively early in development and only had a small team working on it, but BioWare had been teasing its return to Mass Effect for years. After everything that had happened with the studio, it felt like the game that might finally give it a chance to get back to what people loved about BioWare in the first place.

Then, because apparently the whole thing wasn’t depressing enough already, footage from the canceled game leaked shortly after the closure was announced. The footage was later confirmed as genuine and reportedly came from a project internally known as Mass Effect Universe. It was very clearly pre-production material, so judging what the final game might have been from it would be ridiculous, but it did show familiar species, a new protagonist, Liara, and a return to the Milky Way.

Basically, it showed us just enough to make losing it sting a bit more.

BioWare Has Been in Trouble for a While

None of this has exactly come out of nowhere. Mass Effect: Andromeda had a notoriously rough launch, Anthem was nowhere near the success EA wanted, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard also fell short of the publisher’s expectations. Staff left, layoffs followed, and BioWare seemed to get smaller every time its name appeared in the news.

But I don’t think that should be allowed to rewrite the studio’s entire history. BioWare gave us games where companions actually mattered, romances people became weirdly invested in, and choices that could come back to bite you hours or even another game later. Mass Effect carrying your decisions across an entire trilogy still feels special now, and Knights of the Old Republic is still brought up whenever people start arguing about the best Star Wars games ever made.

BioWare definitely lost its way, and pretending otherwise would be silly. But at its best, it was bloody good, and a lot of modern RPGs owe something to what the studio was doing.

Mass Effect Isn’t Completely Dead

There is at least a tiny bit of better news. Amazon’s Mass Effect TV series is reportedly still in development, with the show expected to tell its own story rather than simply trying to recreate Commander Shepard’s. So while BioWare is disappearing and the next game is gone, the Mass Effect universe itself isn’t necessarily finished.

EA also still owns Mass Effect, which means another studio could technically be handed the series somewhere down the line. Whether that ever happens is anyone’s guess, and right now it feels far too early to start talking about who should make another one anyway.

For now, BioWare is coming to an end after more than 30 years. The studio hasn’t been at its best for a long time, but it still gave us some of the best RPGs ever made and characters people are talking about decades later. Whatever you thought of modern BioWare, seeing it disappear like this genuinely sucks.