BioWare is Laying Off Employees Amidst the Development of Mass Effect 5

A blog post by Gary McKay, the General Manager of Bioware, revealed that BioWare is going through a restructuring with a number of their employees being moved to different EA teams.

The blog post further explained that after the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare took the time to reimagine how work is done in the studio and concluded that it doesn’t need the support of the full studio. This means that some of the BioWare employees are going to be assigned to other teams in EA, or worse, laid off.

In a statement provided to IGN, a spokesperson said:

“The studio’s priority was Dragon Age. 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.

“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.”

IGN also reported that a few employees who worked on Dragon Age have had their roles terminated. However, BioWare iterated from the blog post that they are working diligently to make sure that their displaced colleagues are placed in other EA teams that have an open role.

A similar announcement was made in August 2023, when BioWare released a blog post that revealed the termination of 50 roles in the studio following its shift towards a “more agile and focused studio”. Mass Effect 5 is currently still in early development and was announced back in November 2020.