Following yesterday’s BioWare closure announcement, sci-fi authors Catherynne M. Valente and Derek Kunsken both revealed they had been working on the game for years. “It was one of the greatest privileges & GLORIOUS challenges of my life. I smiled every day. I worked HARD for the fans, every day,” Valente wrote. “What we were cooking was really cool,” Kunsken added.
Despite the existence of a 6-year-old teaser for the game, EA executives Cam Weber and David Tinson said in a memo to staff yesterday that there was only “a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect.” The decision “not to move forward with this development” led to BioWare’s closure, which the note calls “a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly.”
In an N7 Day blog post last year, Executive Producer Mike Gamble said, “The team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show.”
“Your support has meant everything to me over the past 17 years at BioWare,” Gamble wrote yesterday on social media.
Despite the game’s cancellation, the Mass Effect universe will still be represented on streaming TV screens. IGN cites “sources inside Prime Video” in reporting that the streaming series first announced in 2024 is still in active development.
As for the series’s future in gaming, an Internet petition has predictably popped up urging EA to continue funding development of the series or license the IP to an outside studio. The petition has nearly 17,500 signatories as of this writing, though those petitioners face an uphill battle convincing EA’s new private ownership to focus on a massive narrative action RPG and not more profitable franchises like Battlefield, The Sims, and annual sports releases.