BioWare was a legendary studio in its heyday, one of the pioneers of the modern RPG genre. Its legacy has permeated through the industry, touching countless games that followed in its footsteps. It feels a bit strange to write that in the past tense, considering that BioWare very much still exists, and released its latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, just last year. But BioWare, as it used to be, is no more.
Of course, every studio is going to change over time. People join, people retire, people leave for greener pastures. But BioWare in particular has seemingly intentionally been cutting its most renowned veterans out. We saw the studio lay off 50 developers in 2023, including two long-standing writers with decades of experience between them.
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Why Did These Layoffs Happen?
Now, after another round of layoffs post-Veilguard, BioWare has fewer than 100 employees. This is down from the reported 200 strong team the studio had in 2023, already considered too small to sustain dual development on its headline Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.
In today’s economic climate, it’s not rare to see layoffs after a game is released, especially if it hasn’t met sales expectations, which was the case with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. However, it seems that this is also partly due to BioWare now only working on one game at a time, leaving many developers with nothing to do until the newest Mass Effect game starts full production.
According to BioWare’s statement, many members of the studio have been assigned to other teams at EA, as it doesn’t “require support from the full studio”. Bloomberg reports that they will be unable to return to their jobs at BioWare unless they reapply for positions they already had. BioWare’s statement doesn’t mention the many employees that were laid off entirely, despite having been with the studio for years, even decades.
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Why Worry About Mass Effect?
Multiple prominent members of BioWare’s team have said on social media that they’ve been laid off, many of whom were heavily involved in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. Among them are Trick Weekes, Karin Weekes-West, and Ryan Cormier. According to a social media post by Ann Lemay, who worked as a writer at BioWare from 2011 to 2016, “not a single of those writers and editors” from that period is still employed by BioWare.
Many of the developers behind Mass Effect left in the 2010s – Casey Hudson, Chris Wynn, and Chris Schlerf, Drew Karpyshyn, Mac Walters, and Mike Laidlaw among others – while others like John Dombrow (now senior writer on Ghost of Yotei) and Sylvia Feketekuty seemingly left voluntarily, but with this round of layoffs, the original team behind the series has been stripped almost entirely.
Granted, the Mass Effect 5 team is headed by a number of veterans from the original trilogy, presumed to be Mike Gamble as executive producer, Derek Watts as art director, Parrish Ley as creative director, Preston Waymaniuk as game director, and Dusty Everman as principal narrative designer. But it seems that none of the original writers remain.
Apart from the obvious tragedy that is a loss of an astonishing amount of talent, we are seeing BioWare essentially reboot itself for its next game, passed into a fresh set of hands less intimately familiar with the series. These hands may be no less talented, but they’re new hands nonetheless. Mass Effect 5 may not be the game we expect it to be, but that’s because BioWare is no longer the studio it once was. Ship of Theseus and all that – if a team has all new members, is it the same team at all?
Mass Effect Trilogy
Action RPG
Third-Person Shooter
- Released
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November 6, 2012
- ESRB
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t
- Genres
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