EA Shuts Down BioWare

Hello, OneTakeShrier here, breaking some very sad news, which is that EA, which recently went private thanks to a leveraged buyout led by Saudi Arabia and a few other investors, is shutting down BioWare, the company behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. EA is shut cutting about 400 jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation, as I reported on Bloomberg this morning. You can find a gift link in the show notes, as always. Around 50 of those jobs were at BioWare, which had shrunk down to a kind of skeleton crew, essentially, that was working on the next Mass Effect game, which was in early development. That game is canceled. EA announced this as part of a broader reorganization. They're cutting a couple of other projects. They said they're focusing on a few projects, including doubling down on Apex Legends. They're still making games like the next Star Wars Jedi and Marvel's Iron Man, continuing Battlefield. They're having Respawn and DICE collaborate on a new project, likely Star Wars Battlefront 3, canceling a couple of other projects,

canceling a Sims game, and doing some layoffs across the company. But, of course, the big news is BioWare. Um once revered studio that has had a shaky last decade. Um BioWare was, of course, founded in 1995 by um some doctors in Edmonton, Canada, and it quickly went on to become one of the most revered studios in the video game industry. It was responsible for hit franchises and games, including Baldur's Gate. Um first Baldur's Gate was, of course, iconic video game. Um Shattered Steel, uh Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and quite a few others. It was acquired by EA in 2007. Uh and at the time it was working on Dragon Age: Origins, um as well as the Mass Effect trilogy. Um under EA, it still had some hits in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises, but after

Dragon Age Inquisition, which came out in 2014, and was fairly well acclaimed, and did pretty well, sold pretty well, won game of the year, um, it has had some misses since then. Mass Effect Andromeda in 2017 sold okay, but was critically panned, and ultimately led to EA shutting down the Montreal office that had led development on that game. And then, of course, its biggest disaster was Anthem, an online shooter that, uh, was designed by former BioWare studio head and Mass Effect leader Casey Hudson, as kind of their their take on multiplayer games. Um, I I don't want to say their version of Destiny, cuz it started out as something else entirely, and in fact, they made a point, as I've reported on Kotaku, of avoiding comparisons to Destiny, and avoiding even talking about Destiny, which I think might have led to some problems for them. Still, that game, online shooter, was not very successful. Had some good things going for it, and,

uh, I think some people were hoping that it could be revived, and there were attempts made to revive it, but that was ultimately shut down. EA pulled the plug after a few years, and BioWare was essentially given one more chance with a game that would become known as Dragon Age Veilguard. That game, of course, went through development hell in its own right, started out as a proper Dragon Age 4, single-player Dragon Age 4, led by Mark Darrah and, uh, Mike Laidlaw in, uh, after Dragon Age Inquisition, but, ran into all sorts of problems, including EA saying, "Hey, this has to be a service game now. This has to be a live service RPG." It was canceled, transformed into a new project, was originally code named Joplin, but transformed into a new project code named Morrison, um, that was a multiplayer version, and then it pivoted back from a multiplayer to a single-player version, but this time around, they didn't get a chance to switch the code name, and remove all the previous costs off the books and essentially make it a new project and said they had to take what they had as the multiplayer game and pivot it into a single player game. They ran into all

sorts of other problems. I wrote about it on Bloomberg last year. It was a really tough project to work on for a variety of reasons. One thing that I wrote about was this kind of sense of the game was delayed multiple years, but it wasn't delayed multiple years at once. It was delayed kind of 6 months at a time, which gave the team behind it no real opportunity to actually hit the reset button and say, "Hey, let's figure out what we can do with all this time." Instead, they just had to make all these short-term decisions with a goal of like 6 months in front of them, but that just kept extending, which led to all sorts of problems along the way. When that game came out, when Dragon Age Veilguard came out, it actually had a lot of momentum and people at BioWare were really excited because the reception critical reception was fairly good. Reviews were pretty strong. People seemed to enjoy it. It got a really good kind of surge in interest at first in sales interest at first, but that quickly dwindled and it missed EA's sales expectations over time. Sold about a million and a half copies, which EA was expecting way more than that. And EA

wound up gutting BioWare, shrinking it down to less than 100 people right now. As of now, it's it's the the When it was shut down, it was around 50 people. So, very small team to work on the next Mass Effect game, which was officially announced in 2020, but had been put on hold for a while as that team also went over to Dragon Age Veilguard to help ship that game. They have been working solely on that for the last year and a half or so, 2 years or so since Dragon Age Veilguard came out and the studio was kind of shrunk down a few months after that. And unfortunately, that game will not happen and BioWare is no more. There used to be a meme floating around a few years back, couple decades back really, that was a pit of bodies and it was Bioware saying to EA, "Papa EA, where are you taking me?" And EA was just taking it to this body pit and of course he could see all the other studios that EA has shut down in that pit.

A lot of people had been I guess it took a lot longer for that comic to prove prescient than people expected when Bioware was first bought by EA, which of course had a very bad reputation in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But now that day has come, Bioware is no more. There there will be a lot to be said about the studio, I'm sure, and its legacy and um the people who worked there over the years, the very talented people who worked on franchises like Dragon Age and and Mass Effect. Original Mass Effect trilogy and Dragon Age Origins in particular, I think were really beloved by a lot of people and I think just meant a lot to a lot of people, those franchises and those characters really resonated with millions of fans out there. But after the last three games, it seems that the studio the fair to say that the studio has been on thin ice for a while now and when this

leverage buyout happened, when Saudi Arabia took over, there was of course lots of speculation, lots of people wondered if Bioware would be shut down as a result of that. Well, we don't know. EA has not said and I will hopefully try to find out a little bit more about, but EA has not said if there were attempts to sell Bioware. It seems like a waste to put the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises on hold indefinitely and not do anything with them. We also don't quite know, I guess maybe we'll find out. I'm reporting this just as it's happening, but maybe we will find out soon if the Mass Effect TV show with Amazon is still moving forward and what that is going to look like. So, not not clear if EA tried to sell BioWare or sell the franchises leading up to this. Um so, uh here's letter to staff um that uh EA uh sent out. EA Chief Operating Officer David Tinson and Chief Studios Officer Cam Weber um wrote

this letter to staff and um I'll read a couple of quotes from it. They said, quote, "Over the past several months, we've taken a hard look at our business um in order to uh kind of do some reprioritiz- re- reprioritizing, um shift focus, and streamline, and yada yada yada." Um let me see if I can find the quote. Quote, another quote from them, "Across our portfolio, we're making deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth." They talk about uh doubling down on sports stuff and um doing more investments in China, yada yada yada, just kind of typical stuff. I'm waiting for this to load. Remember, this one take try here. We don't do edits here. So, while I wait for this letter to load and pull up an exact quote about BioWare, I'll share a couple of other interesting things about what's going on right now. One is that um so, I mentioned about 400 jobs are being cut, including 50 at BioWare. Um so, uh EA's deal to go private has been

in the works for about a year. It was officially closed 2 months ago in August. Um it is a $55 billion leveraged buyout, the largest leveraged buyout in history, led by Saudi Arabia's investment fund, also um Silver Lake, and also Jared Kushner, uh son-in-law of President Trump. Uh his investment firm is involved, too. Um a leveraged buyout essentially means that I am buying if if I'm an investor group, I am buying a company, and then with the money that I'm using to buy the company, I'm taking out uh debt from a bank, bank loans to pay for it, and then putting those bank loans on the company itself, which is um uh interesting, an interesting concept. So, essentially, that $55 billion that was paid to buy EA, um which essentially means that uh a certain amount of money, I believe it was $210 is paid out for each share because EA was a publicly traded company, meaning that it was owned by public investors everywhere, and every person who owned a share will get $210 uh for that share or got when the deal closed. So, $55 billion was

paid to shareholders, and that money is coming in part from a $18 billion in debt, really $20 billion in debt. I mean, there's some I won't get into all the financial machinations, but $18 billion of that is being placed in debt on EA's books. So, it's being paid for with itself. Um oh, here's the quote I was looking for. Um Uh ch- I just had it. Okay. Um Here, I'm going to read this whole quote about BioWare. Quote, "As we focus on these larger opportunities, we've had a small team at BioWare working on early development for Mass Effect. We've made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we're closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly. All right. There will be more to say about BioWare in the future, I'm sure, but for now, I'm going to sign off. Sad news, tragic news. Bye."