To video game players, developers and industry watchers, the sudden closure of Edmonton-based BioWare came as a shock but not necessarily a surprise.
“I knew BioWare wasn’t long for this world, so I had already done my mourning for that studio. And so when this news came down, I was like, yep, that’s pretty much what I expected,” said Ash Parrish, a writer for the gaming news site Kotaku. “This sucks super hard.”
The studio, founded in Edmonton in 1995 by three doctors and acquired by U.S.-based games publisher Electronic Arts in 2007, was shuttered as part of company-wide layoffs on Wednesday.
Its developers specialized in role-playing games with a heavy emphasis on storytelling and player agency, including Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
“Our thoughts are with everyone affected by this news, along with their families and colleagues. Canada’s video game industry is home to an exceptional depth of talent and creativity, and the contributions of the people who built BioWare will remain an important part of our industry’s story,” said Paul Fogolin, president of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, in a statement.
Gamers, developers and critics lamented the news online, with many crediting its works for kickstarting their own careers in the games industry. They also noted that while BioWare may be no more, its impact on video games will continue into the future.
Financial pressures after Saudi buyout
The recent fortunes of EA made BioWare’s closure less shocking. BioWare’s staff was slashed from about 200 to less than half that in 2025, after Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet internal sales expectations.
Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and a private equity firm owned by U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner finalized a $55-billion US buyout of EA. It included $20 billion borrowed from U.S. bank JPMorgan, which now hangs over EA as leveraged debt.
Alyssa Mercante, a digital trends writer for Digiday and a former games journalist, said EA likely thought it was more important to maintain its “biggest moneymakers,” like sports games and online multiplayer shooters with live service elements, than the titles with a “lengthy development cycle” and the deep role-playing games (RPGs) that BioWare is known for.
Live service games offer additional content, which can sometimes include randomized trading card-like content packs, that costs more money or subscriptions on top of the initial retail price. EA credited live service games like Battlefield 6 and the soccer franchise EA Sports FC for reaching live service revenues of $1.47 billion US in the previous quarter.
RPGs like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, meanwhile, are sold like a single book or movie, with few avenues for additional monetized content.
Groundbreaking narrative, diverse stories and characters
BioWare’s games have long been celebrated for featuring characters of diverse gender identities and backgrounds. For example, players can choose whether the main character Shepard in Mass Effect or Hawke in Dragon Age is male or female. Some games also have optional same-sex romantic storylines between main characters and narratives featuring transgender characters.
Gaming writer Parrish credits Dragon Age: Origins (2009) for pulling her out of an emotionally difficult time in her life.
“I’m like, let me try it and see, you know, if this sparks joy. And it did,” she said. “It just rewrote my brain chemistry in ways that I’m still experiencing … to this day.”
A promotional screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard. (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
She credits it for inspiring her to become a games journalist and Dragon Age fan communities online for connecting her with lifelong friends who would go on to attend her wedding years later.
Mercante had a similar journey when she first played Dragon Age’s sci-fi sister series Mass Effect.
“It had wrapped itself around my core personality and kind of stayed there for a while in my teens, early 20s,” she said.
Voice actor Jennifer Hale is photographed in her studio on Vancouver Island, B.C., in 2024. (Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press)
Players at the outset chose whether to play as a male Shephard, voiced by Mark Meer, or “FemShep” (as she’s known by fans), played by Vancouver Island-based Jennifer Hale.
“Being FemShep means an enormous amount to me,” said Hale, who called it “an extraordinary privilege” to play a main character whose female version was treated on an equal footing as her male counterpart.
“That means the world to me. I love me some kicking down barriers.”
Natalie Checo, a Vancouver-based video game designer originally from the U.S., says she connected particularly with the genetically enhanced operative Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect 2.
“What resonated for me was the story about a woman who is biologically engineered to be perfect, and yet she still can’t really attain that, because being perfect is a human impossibility,” she said. “I think women grow up in a society that pushes us to be as perfect as possible.”
Checo says that many of her game developer friends are from marginalized communities, and BioWare’s games “pushed us to dream more than our real world has allowed us to feel like we can.”
Ongoing legacy
Osama Dorias, a Montreal-based developer at HeartLoop Games, says BioWare’s games taught him important lessons when working on narrative-based games of his own.
“I played Mass Effect 1, and I was really surprised by the level of agency that they were able to give the protagonist Shepard, and how the characters still had their own personality,” he said.
Varric the dwarf and Solas the elf are seen in Dragon Age: Inquisition. (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
Dorias, Mercante and others pointed to successful RPGs by other studios that have carried on that format, including CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series and Baldur’s Gate 3, a direct sequel to BioWare’s games of the same name made by Belgian studio Larian.
Dorias calls BioWare’s closing “heartbreaking,” estimating that at its peak, the company may have employed half of all full-time employees in Edmonton’s games industry.
He noted that several independent studios have formed over the years from former BioWare developers, building games that may stray significantly from its role-playing game blueprint but still have “the same really strong character development and storytelling.”
“I can’t understate how influential those franchises from BioWare were to the industry at large. It really, really had a big impact.”
Hale hopes Bioware’s IPs will live on
In the days after BioWare’s closure, a trailer for the now-cancelled Mass Effect game was leaked online, reportedly by a former BioWare employee.
An image from a reportedly leaked trailer for an upcoming Mass Effect game from BioWare. The studio was closed down by its parent company Electronic Arts on Oct. 21 and the game was cancelled mid-development. (Dejahvoe Ivoe/YouTube)
After watching the trailer for the first time, Hale called it “gorgeous,” and said she holds out hope that if EA has no plans for one of its other studios complete the game, that it might sell the IP and let another team finish the work.
“I think the fans would be overjoyed if that IP found a place to live that was just some small, little maverick place…. They would engender a great deal of good will,” she said.
“So let that thing go, and let us, the community, play and let us do beautiful things with this story that is still wanting to be told.”
