BioWare’s Mass Effect Team of Around 50 People Lost Out to Star Wars Battlefront 3 as EA Sidelined Laura Miele, Its Key Advocate

EA's decision to shut down BioWare and cancel the next Mass Effect installment, the ambitious Universe, reportedly came down to a choice between funding its production or another expensive sci-fi project: Star Wars Battlefront 3, which is being made by DICE and Respawn.

The news comes from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who learned that the publisher chose Star Wars as financial pressure pushed it toward what executives considered the safer bet. In a video accompanying his latest Bloomberg newsletter, Schreier said his reporting draws on conversations with people familiar with strategy at both EA and BioWare. Crucially, Battlefront 3 has not even entered development yet; it was a prospective project that emerged fairly recently from discussions with Lucasfilm.

Schreier clarifies that the opportunity to make another Battlefront arose several months ago, following renewed interest in Battlefront 2. At the same time, EA was reviewing its portfolio amid the financial demands of its $55 billion leveraged buyout from a consortium of investors led by PIF. The transaction places approximately $18 billion in debt on EA, with annual interest payments exceeding $1 billion.

Both prospective projects would require hundreds of millions of dollars. Battlefront 3 would need to be built from scratch, while Mass Effect remained in relatively early development with around 50 people at BioWare, and completing the RPG would have required substantially expanding that team or bringing in external development support.

Despite being announced in 2020, Mass Effect Universe was still years away. Schreier attributes much of that delay to its developers spending roughly a year and a half to two years helping finish Dragon Age: The Veilguard, including work on its final mission. So, when push came to shove, EA decided to prioritize Battlefront 3 rather than fund both games. Schreier identifies that investment decision as the largest factor behind BioWare’s closure, although not the only one.

The studio's recent record also weighed against it. The Veilguard missed expectations, Anthem was a major failure, and Mass Effect: Andromeda suffered a mixed critical reception. Schreier argues that EA's executives also understand shooters and predictable franchise releases better than the development demands of sprawling, branching RPGs, and there's ample evidence for that; even Jennifer Hale and Mark Darrah publicly stated that the publisher never really understood what BioWare is all about.

An executive reshuffle reportedly compounded the problem. Laura Miele, described by Schreier as an important advocate for BioWare and Mass Effect, was sidelined, while David Tinson and Cam Weber gained influence. Both have substantial backgrounds in EA's sports business. The result was a round of layoffs that extended well beyond BioWare's remaining staff, with another 350 jobs cut elsewhere in the company. Meanwhile, Amazon's Mass Effect television adaptation is still moving forward, so the franchise's screen ambitions have survived even as its next game has not.

For BioWare fans, the particularly painful detail is that Mass Effect apparently lost out to a game that had not yet started development. Schreier's account tells us of a publisher in financial trouble choosing where to place its next enormous investment, and deciding BioWare's RPG was the riskier proposition. To be honest, Battlefront 3 is easily going to sell a lot more copies than a new Mass Effect would, especially with the degraded trust in the studio's ability to make hits. That explains the decision, but it does nothing to soften the loss of such a historic RPG developer.

Fans are still hoping it will somehow be saved by a third party. In the meantime, the Change.org petition is nearing 285K signatures.

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