What’s left of BioWare, the renowned RPG powerhouse behind beloved franchises like Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the original Baldur’s Gate games? It’s a hard question to answer in 2025 after multiple rounds of layoffs and restructurings as the studio pivots between the character-driven stories fans love and the live-service gaming models investors want. The only thing that seems certain is that the studio’s entire fate feels like it’s riding on Mass Effect 5, a game that’s still a long ways off.
BioWare general manager Gary McKay tried to explain the current state of the studio in a new blog post that was full of vague ambitions but light on actual specifics. We know that the studio has completely moved on from last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard and is focused entirely on making the next Mass Effect. The studio says it’s being developed by a “core team” under the guidance of series veterans Mike Gamble, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, Parrish Ley, and others.
From there, things get hazy. Here’s an excerpt from McKay’s brief blog post:
In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect, we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans. We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.
Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for EA declined to elaborate further. “The studio’s priority was Dragon Age,” they wrote in an email to Kotaku. “During this time there were people continuing to build the vision for the next Mass Effect. Now that The Veilguard has shipped, the studio’s full focus is Mass Effect.”
Back in June, BioWare offloaded its MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic to an outside developer and laid of some of the staff associated with maintaining the ongoing multiplayer RPG. A few months later, the studio laid off 50 more employees, including some longtime veterans of the team. At the time, it was believed that this left BioWare with a rough headcount of maybe 200. It’s unclear how much lower that number has gone after this latest restructuring.
It would be unusual for a “core” team in early production on a game to consist of over 100 people. EA declined to say how many people BioWare still employs. “While we’re not sharing numbers, the studio has the right number of people in the right roles to work on Mass Effect at this stage of development,” the spokesperson wrote in the email to Kotaku.
IGN reports that while some employees were moved to other projects within EA, some staff who had been working on The Veilguard were laid off. [Update 1/31/2025 2:51 p.m. ET: Bloomberg reports the studio now has fewer than 100 employees after dozens were laid off and dozens more were permanently moved to other EA studios. The cuts included veteran staff like writer Trick Weekes who worked on Mass Effect and Dragon Age for decades.]
Today’s announcement comes roughly a week after former BioWare producer Mark Darrah released a YouTube video in which he talked about his old studio only having one game to focus on for the first time in decades. Little is known about Mass Effect 5, including its official title. It was first teased back at The Game Awards 2020 and was later confirmed to be a sequel of sorts to the original trilogy.
Darrah called the process of BioWare finding out it can’t work on more than one game at a time “painful” but also suggested the downsizing could have a silver lining for Mass Effect. “This might be great because what it means is that BioWare, for the first time really ever, is able to singularly focus on a single project, is able to put all of its attention on a single project, is able to put everything it has towards a single goal, which is making the best Mass Effect it possibly can.”
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