ranzware
Bloomberg reports that, following EA’s layoffs and restructuring at BioWare, the studio now has fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 200 during the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Meanwhile, at its peak, BioWare consisted of three studios and, conservatively, over 400 employees.
Interestingly, Bloomberg’s sources say that the plan to “loan” BioWare developers to other EA studios while the next Mass Effect was in pre-production was put in place shortly after The Veilguard launched, but before its sales failure came to light. Regardless of The Veilguard’s ultimate performance, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah’s prediction that the studio had become a one game at a time outfit was on the money, and many devs would have had nothing to work on before Mass Effect entered full production.
Those relocations were made permanent following the news of Veilguard missing its sales target by 50%, with an additional 20+ full layoffs on top of that. According to Bloomberg, BioWare’s staff is now down to fewer than 100 people. During development of The Veilguard, the studio had over 200 employees. But we can go further back to better understand the full scope of BioWare’s decline in the past decade.
- A 2019 Global News report on BioWare’s office relocation quoted it as having 320 employees at its original Edmonton location.
- Eurogamer reported “between 80 and 150” developers were working on BioWare Austin’s Shadow Realm in 2014—it’s unclear how they were distributed between Austin and Edmonton, but a majority would have been at the Texas location.
- Concrete numbers on Bioware Montreal are scarce: The CBC reported it had just 55 people in 2010 shortly after its formation, but 2017’s Mass Effect Andromeda credits over 300 people directly on development, with a majority of them presumably at Montreal given its status as lead studio on the project.
These numbers come from three different points in the 2010s and don’t fully differentiate who was where and when, but even conservatively, I think we can estimate that peak BioWare was around 400-500 employees strong for much of the last decade. Even with BioWare’s reported internal struggles with a slapdash crunch culture and confused development goals on Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, I don’t know how to view this as anything other than a totalizing failure on the part of EA.
Over the past 10-years, the once-dominant mega publisher has squandered what was the household name in North American RPG development, the originator of a cinematic RPG form that continues to deliver excellent games, impressive profits, and stable employment at studios like Larian, CD Projekt, and Obsidian. BioWare’s EA-mandated pivots to and from live service indicate to me that its parent company never really knew what to do with the studio. A beloved gaming institution and its influential fantasy worlds have been utterly squandered, to say nothing of the lives and talents of those who passed through BioWare’s offices.
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Kurt Indovina
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