BioWare quietly lay off key Dragon Age team members while talking up the next Mass Effect

The layoff train has come for BioWare. A number of Dragon Age: The Veilguard staff are leaving the celebrated RPG company in the course of plans to become “a more agile, focused studio”, as BioWare move ahead with the next Mass Effect game. Posting on Bluesky, senior systems designer Michelle Flamm, producer Jen Cheverie, editor Karin West-Weekes, lead writer Trick Weekes and narrative designer Ryan Cormier have all announced that they’re looking for work.

All of which feels like it warrants a mention in general manager George McKay’s recent blog about BioWare’s future, but he comments only that they’re “taking the opportunity to reimagine” how BioWare operate between projects, and “have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.” Which is a very slippery way to say that you’re making a load of people redundant.

“Today, we are turning towards the future and preparing for the next chapter in BioWare’s story,” reads the full post from McKay, which was published yesterday. “As we announced in August 2023, we are changing how we build games to meet the needs of our upcoming projects and hold ourselves to the highest quality standards.”

For context, the August 2023 announcement was this one, in which McKay revealed that BioWare would chop 50 roles in the course of “reorganizing our team to match the studio’s changing needs.”

BioWare are now doing some more reorganising, after ending production of a massive RPG. According to McKay, a “core team” led by Mass Effect trilogy veterans, including Mike Gamble, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts and Parrish Ley, are currently working on Mass Effect 5, or whatever they end up calling it. Other people have been transferred to other EA projects, with the quiet part being that they face redundancy if suitable roles are not to be found.

“In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect, we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans,” McKay continues in this week’s blog post. “We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.

“Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio,” he continues. “We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.”

Our fellow Zifflings at Ian Games have asked BioWare and EA how many people have been laid off or retained in the course of the above “reimagining”. According to a spokesperson, “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.” Which, again, is a very slippery way to say that a bunch of people are now unemployed.

Some more context for these decisions. Firstly, Dragon Age: The Veilguard hasn’t sold enough for EA. The RPG “engaged approximately 1.5 million players” in the publisher’s last reported financial quarter, which was “down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations”. The game’s most recent update was worded in such a way as to suggest there wouldn’t be any more. Game director Corinne Busche left BioWare earlier this month, though she has said this departure was voluntary.

Secondly, the fourth main Dragon Age game appears to have been quite a complicated production, even by blockbuster RPG standards. It began life in 2015 as a smaller, narrative-focussed project called “Joplin”. Then EA and BioWare tried to turn it into a live service game, based on the code for ill-fated mechsuit bonanza Anthem. When Anthem flopped, they dumped the new Dragon Age project’s multiplayer elements. That’s around 10 years of decisions and indecisions, with key staff leaving in the interval – Joplin’s original team lead Mike Laidlaw is now founder and director of Eternal Strands developers Yellow Brick Games.

You can understand why EA and BioWare might want to avoid such a situation again. And while it may not be defensible – EA earned billions of dollars last year, and appear to be profitable – it’s sadly not unusual for studios to scale back once they’ve shipped a big game, even when it has sold relatively well. I don’t particularly doubt McKay’s assertion that sincere efforts have been made to place people elsewhere. Still, if you’re going to let a bunch of people go, you could at least do them the courtesy of saying that out loud.