Electronic Arts, headquartered in Redwood Shores, is laying off around 400 employees and closing BioWare, the studio it has run for more than three decades. The upcoming Mass Effect game — which would have been the fifth since 2007 — has been canceled, with its early development now ended.

According to Redwood City Pulse, EA emailed employees on Wednesday, October 21, saying the cuts were made to focus on more lucrative projects, and Bloomberg reported the layoffs include roughly 50 staff at BioWare itself.

BioWare announced the closure in a statement on X: 'After more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending. There is nothing easy about writing those words.'

For devoted RPG fans, this is the reversal nobody wanted: the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age — the defining Western-RPG house of the 2000s — is gone entirely, not just downsized. The timing is what stings.

Redwood City Pulse reports EA went private in August in a deal that valued the company at $55 billion, led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners and Affinity Partners, the investment firm run by Jared Kushner.

Within months of that buyout, the studio's flagship sci-fi franchise is dead in development.

BioWare's statement said the company's focus right now is on its 'incredibly talented team' and on 'supporting one another through this transition,' while EA said it would try to help affected employees find other roles internally, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by Redwood City Pulse.

The most surprising twist: a Canadian politician wants the studio handed to its own workers.

Tech4Gamers reports that Avi Lewis, leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, called out EA for buying up businesses and running them into the ground, proposing that BioWare's employees be given the first opportunity — and federal support — to buy the studio and run it themselves.

'The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio. They know how to make the games we all love,' Lewis posted on October 21.

Tech4Gamers cautions the idea faces real hurdles: EA has shown no intention of selling BioWare, nobody knows whether the Mass Effect and Dragon Age IPs would be sold or discontinued, and the studio's recent output — with its last big hits in the 2010s and Dragon Age: The Veilguard underwhelming — complicates the pitch.

The community response has been immediate and organized. A petition to save Mass Effect has reached roughly 50,000 signatures since EA announced the closure, per Tech4Gamers, signaling that demand for the franchise remains intense even as the studio behind it disappears.

Redwood City Pulse adds a wrinkle for the homefront: Redwood City's communications manager, Nadine Abousalem, said on Friday, October 23, that the city has not received a WARN notice indicating local positions are affected. Neither EA nor BioWare responded to the Pulse's request for comment.

Whether the employee-buyout idea gains traction, the IPs surface elsewhere, or the petition changes anything, the franchise that defined a genre now sits entirely in EA's hands.