Electronic Arts shut down the legendary RPG studio BioWare last week, ending development on an untitled fifth Mass Effect game. Since then, we’ve seen what appears to be a leaked trailer for the game, which suggests it might have been called Mass Effect Universe, and heard a sneak peek at what Grammy-winning composer Austin Wintory was cooking up for the beloved sci-fi RPG series. Over the past week, fans across the internet have tried to piece together how a publisher could decide to shut down a studio as prolific as BioWare, but according to a new Bloomberg report, the answer is Star Wars.
More specifically, Bloomberg writes that, presented with the opportunity to develop Star Wars Battlefront III with Disney, the publisher, which went private last year after a $55 billion acquisition, chose to invest its money into that instead of BioWare’s in-development Mass Effect sequel. The publication writes that EA looked at its portfolio for the coming years and had two massive sci-fi investments it could continue: Star Wars Battlefront III or BioWare’s next Mass Effect. Even though Mass Effect was well into development, and even though the Battlefront threequel hasn’t even entered development, EA chose to continue with the latter. And so BioWare was shut down, and Mass Effect development ended, though Bloomberg’s sources say there are other, less significant reasons the studio was shuttered, too.
Those other factors include the poor reception to 2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda, the failure of Anthem in 2019, and 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which, despite garnering positive critical reception, apparently missed EA’s sales expectations by 50%.
There’s also the uncomfortable reality that BioWare made progressive LGBTQIA+ positive games but was a studio within a publisher house now partially owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a government fund from a country where same-sex activity, including marriage, is criminalized, sometimes punishable by death; these harsh laws extend to other facets of the LGBTQIA+ community. Another investment partner in this acquisition of EA is Affinity Partners, a Miami-based investment firm founded and run by former White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, a political figure who imposes laws that discriminate against the LGBTQIA+ community, especially the 1% of Americans who are transgender; Trump has also been known to mock this community in various ways. No official statements say BioWare shut down because of its progressive leanings, but one has to wonder if that was a factor, especially after reports that BioWare scrubbed diversity from demos to avoid negative feedback from EA (thanks, Kotaku).
When BioWare closed last week, only 50 employees remained, all working on the next Mass Effect, after years of layoffs at the studio.
A Mass Effect TV series is still in the works at Amazon, even though EA seems to have hung up Commander Shepard’s video game suit for good.
[Source: Bloomberg]
