EA Killed the Next Mass Effect. Its Writers Say It Was Great.

The Oct. 21 closure ended early work on the first new Mass Effect since 2017's Andromeda, part of about 400 EA job cuts.

“We did figure it out,” Catherynne M. Valente, one of the writers on the next Mass Effect, posted on X on Oct. 21, the day the game was cancelled. She was answering a user who'd called the game industry broken for failing to make a sequel to “the literal best game of all time.” Her next line: “We were working on a great game. Just saying.”

Electronic Arts is closing BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and ending work on the next Mass Effect, PC Gamer reported, pointing to the studio's own farewell post. Bloomberg put EA's companywide cuts at around 400 jobs. Late Wednesday, IGN reported that former writers on the game fans call Mass Effect 5 were speaking out, and what they're saying is that the game worked.

Derek Künsken, a sci-fi novelist, said he'd worked with BioWare on and off for five years on the project, Insider Gaming reported, and that “what we were cooking was really cool.” He wrote that pitching story, character and lore with Valente was the most energizing collaboration he's ever had.

He also wrote about the people. All 50 of them deserve praise and new jobs, Künsken said, and then he admitted he's job hunting in games himself: “how does LinkedIn even work??”

Fans got their first glimpse of this Mass Effect in a 2020 tease, and the expectation ever since was that characters from the first trilogy would come back. Insider Gaming reported it was being built in Epic's Unreal Engine rather than Frostbite, the EA engine behind Andromeda. After layoffs in 2025, BioWare said a core team was still on it. That team, and that game, lasted until Oct. 21.

The closure comes two months after EA changed hands. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the firm owned by Jared Kushner, bought the company in a deal valued at $55 billion, announced in September 2025 and closed in August. GamingBolt reported that the leveraged buyout loaded EA with heavy debt, and that the company is expected to lean on Battlefield, Apex Legends and its yearly sports games.

The staff letter EA posted on its website, signed by chief studios officer Cam Weber and COO David Tinson, argued that turning down some projects the company cares about frees up people and money for its biggest bets. Weber, PC Gamer noted, ran EA Sports until recently.

BioWare's own record left it exposed to that math. Three doctors, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, founded it in 1995, and it made Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights before EA bought it in 2007. Then came a rough decade: Mass Effect: Andromeda landed softer than the trilogy in 2017, the live-service shooter Anthem flopped in 2019 and had its servers shut off for good this year, and EA itself said 2024's Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed.

BioWare's farewell thanked players for debating their choices and falling for its characters. Nobody will get to make this game's choices. Künsken says he hopes to say more about it in a few weeks, once he finds out what he can and can't say.

Source: gamingbolt.com, retrieved October 22, 2026. Other sources: pcgamer.com, insider-gaming.com.