BioWare's closure and the galaxy left without an owner
BioWare's closure leaves Mass Effect without a future and its players without a galaxy. Why it hurts and what it says about who owns a science fiction universe.
LA VIDA DEL ESCRITOR
Jose M. Aldasoro
10/25/20264 min read
Some news you read and then get on with your day. Wednesday's wasn't one of them. BioWare is closing, and the next Mass Effect, the one we'd been waiting years for, will never exist. I'll say it straight: it hurt, because I absolutely love Mass Effect.
What happened
On 21 October, BioWare announced on social media that it was closing and that development of the next Mass Effect, still at an early stage, was over. According to Bloomberg, EA is cutting around 400 jobs, roughly 3% of its workforce, and about 50 of them are at BioWare. It comes two months after the purchase of EA by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund closed, a 55-billion-dollar deal.
Behind the headline there are some fifty people who have just lost their jobs, and that comes before any nostalgia. But a story of more than thirty years is also ending. BioWare was founded in 1995 by two doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, who decided their calling was making role-playing games. EA bought the studio in 2007, the same year the first Mass Effect came out.
I build universes too, on a smaller scale. In my novels, every story leaves a case file behind. If you want to read the one ZEUS tried to erase, the case file I share with my subscribers is here.
Why I love Mass Effect
I've played them all. I got hooked on the first one, loved it, and stayed until the end of the trilogy. But where I really lost myself was Andromeda: I put hundreds of hours into it. Landing on alien worlds and exploring them at my own pace was a joy, and I loved the combat. I know Andromeda didn't get great press when it came out in 2017. I didn't care.
But there's something more, and it's what hooks me as a writer. Mass Effect wasn't content with putting pretty ships on screen. It invented its own physics and explained it. Everything revolves around element zero, a material that can alter the mass of objects when an electric current is applied to it. That gives you the engines, the weapons, the shields and the mass relays, that network of giant structures that lets you cross the galaxy in an instant. And if you wanted to know how anything worked, there was the Codex, an in-game encyclopaedia that explained it with a rigour plenty of novels could only dream of.
The trilogy had another stroke of genius: your Shepard. The choices you made in the first game followed you into the second and the third. People you saved, people you let die, alliances that fell apart. Every player finished the saga with a different story, and felt it was theirs.
And Andromeda gave all of that a destination. It was no longer about saving the galaxy, but about reaching a new one after a six-hundred-year journey and finding somewhere to live. That's science fiction at its best: landing on a planet nobody has ever set foot on and discovering, at the same time as your character, whether you can breathe there.
A galaxy that doesn't belong to the people who live in it
These days, Mass Effect has racked up more than 200,000 posts on X. Some people are calling for someone to rescue the series. And mind you, Mass Effect fans have moved mountains before: in 2012 they rebelled against the ending of the trilogy, and BioWare ended up releasing a free extended ending that same year. Few fan communities can claim anything like it.
The problem is that this time there's no studio left to convince. The galaxy where millions of people have spent hundreds of hours belongs to a company, and the company has decided that, for now, nobody plays there any more. Nobody knows what will happen to the rights to Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Maybe it will come back one day. Maybe not.
I write my novels on my own, and that has plenty of drawbacks. But it has one advantage I see differently today: no board of directors can shut down the universe they take place in. If it ever ends, it will be because I decided so.
To those of you who travelled the Milky Way with Shepard or Andromeda with Ryder, I don't need to tell you what's being lost. And if you've never played them, they're still there: the trilogy, remastered in the 2021 Legendary Edition, and Andromeda. Those galaxies, at least, nobody can shut down.
Which science fiction universe would it hurt you to lose like this?
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© 2026 Jose M. Aldasoro