BioWare Might Be Imploding; Cuts 50 Positions And Cites Need To Become "Agile" For Release of Dreadwolf

In news that certainly came out of nowhere, BioWare announced it was cutting 50 positions from its workforce. Some of these cuts impacted senior staff, as Jon Renish, BioWare's Technical Director who has been with the company for over eight years, announced they were one of the staff hit by cuts. The timing is certainly worrisome considering Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is still in active development and has a planned release date of 2024. Oh, who can forget about the barely announced Mass Effect 4, which BioWare's current GM, Gary McKay:, affirms exists and will continue to move forward in development despite these cuts. Other choice words in their statement include:

BioWare can continue to thrive in an industry that’s rapidly evolving, we must shift towards a more agile and more focused studio. It will allow our developers to iterate quickly, unlock more creativity, and form a clear vision of what we’re building before development ramps up.

The layoffs will likely be a blow to morale

We’ve chosen to act now in part to provide our impacted colleagues with as many internal opportunities as possible. These changes coincide with a significant number of roles that are currently open across EA’s other studios. Impacted employees will be provided with professional resources and assistance as they apply for these positions.

While it’s unlikely that everyone will find a new role within the company, we are committed to supporting our staff as they navigate this change.

If there is one good part to this press release, BioWare's general manager affirmed that laid off employees deserved to be credited in the final version of Dreadwolf that comes out.

Also, as if laying off staff members with a pending release wasn't a bad enough look for BioWare and its owner, EA, VentureBeat reported that BioWare is severing ties with a playtesting group, Keywords, which recently agreed to unionize. Wowzers, you mean to tell me the CEO of EA might have anti-union tendencies?

Our very own Jeff Grubb has stated that he plans to host a Game Mess Morning on 08/24/2023 that delves into more details on what EA's mindset is and what they plan to do to guarantee BioWare can get Dreadwolf to ship by its 2024 date. Also, what do we think the timer looks like on a shutdown of Anthem servers?

That statement was a helluva thing to read. It's "unlikely" that everyone will find a job at EA Frankly, it seems pretty fucking optimistic that they'll even WANT a job at EA. The line about allowing them to "unlock more creativity" is insane. You unlock more creativity by...firing creators? What?

Congrats to BioWare management on finding a way to fuck over unionized workers while not meeting the strict legal definition of union-busting. Seems pretty creative.

The Anthem servers are still up!?

Anyway, seems they're letting go of a bunch of writers, including the lead writer for Baldur's Gate, so Dreadwolf might be the last hurrah of story and characters being a focus I guess. Just baffling all around

It wasn’t that long ago that Bioware was the toast of the entire industry. This just plain sucks. I hope the people affected can get scooped up quickly by someone that will treat them better, but I don’t know what things are like job-wise in Edmonton.

Thunderfuck the people in leadership who made this and the obviously anti-union decisions.

@allthedinos: It was pretty long ago.

When is the last time Bioware launched a game that didn't disappoint a significant portion of their fans? Mass Effect II in 2010? That's 13 years. There are lots of important developers that didn't last that long overall.

Some of the games after that have their fans (I liked Mass Effect III quite a bit despite its issues) but games that seemed like a misstep now look like the start of a slow and accelerating collapse.

Bioware was such a good studio that it took EA much longer than usual to destroy it!

Yeah, it ain't good. Poor Bioware has had a shitty decade. Inquisition was their last hit, which was comparatively decisive to fans. I liked it as I played it but retroactively had a lot of criticisms of it's MMO-ness. The Old Republic was a money maker and likely the main thing keeping the lights on after bombs like Anthem and disappointments like Andromeda (a better game than it's rep, but still an awful game by Mass Effect standards and a buggy mess without fan patches.) But Old Republic is old also as old as Skyrim and I doubt sustains the company like it once did.

At this point, Dreadwolf has next to no chance at saving the company, not just due to it's clearly troubles development, but also because Dragon Age is the smaller of it's two big franchises, and both it and Mass Effect have lost a lot of their significance. Even if Dreadwolf is a fantastic game, I highly doubt it's gonna blow the doors off.

My honest prediction? Once Dreadwolf releases, Bioware becomes a support studio, another studio inherits Mass Effect, which will pop out a multiplayer focused release and then Bioware is well and truly dead. I wish it weren't so, and I hope I'm wrong, but this is the sort of thing that has happened before.

@bigsocrates: I feel like most people still trusted bioware to just make good games all the way up until Andromeda though. I think that was the clear point where it turned into “wait what IS BioWare now?” and then Anthem laid it all to rest.

Simply put, Bioware shouldn't have sold their souls to EA. None of this surprises me.

yeah, certainly not a good sign. Dreadwolf seems pretty troubled- even money says it doesn't come out (at least from me).

but it's true- i haven't been super stoked on Bioware since Mass Effect 3 (to say nothing of that game, i liked it just fine). i feel like Bioware's cultural capital is already spent at this point- seems like if any vets are left they should maybe look towards doing their own thing (if not recruited by other studios).

I have a hardcover book about 25 years of BioWare on my bookshelf. Knights of the Old Republic was the series that got me into roleplaying games--although notably I prefer the second game. If a decade ago you had told me that BioWare would be in this state and Obsidian would be putting out two hits within a couple months of each other, I would've been hopeful but I wouldn't have believed you.

The word on DA4 development a year ago was that it was going fairly well. This sounds to me like BioWare is going to finish DA4 then condense down to a 1-team studio, finish the next Mass Effect and then reevaluate whether to grow back up to a 2-team studio.

It is curious to think that with Inquisition and specially the last DLC end it looks that despite all troubles, they sort at least had a good idea where to go next... but between everything that happened, I wonder how much was left, if any, of the original ideas since it very likely the project had several resets and between the people leaving.

I still think that we might see the end result, but I expect more delays.

I feel like anyone looking for a "Bioware fix" has been able to get it from other places for a while now. The Witcher 3 was the poster-child for that for a long time, but eventually we got The Outer Worlds, and now we've got (in some sense of irony) Baldur's Gate 3 apparently doing incredibly well. Even before that, Obsidian put out Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny and Larian did their two Divinity games, among a pile of other isometric RPGs over the past decade. These might not get the "Bioware fix" for anyone who needs their RPGs to have facial animations and camera angles, but if you were looking for stories and characters, Bioware hasn't been the cream of the crop for much longer than people seem to realize. They've been falling apart for over a decade and their last good game was Dragon Age Inquisition, if you're being really generous, and the last great one was Mass Effect 3.

I haven't said much of anything about this anywhere, but I've found myself wondering when EA is going to add Bioware to the pile of development studio corpses they keep in the basement, not if.

Quick, someone get in here and defend big corporations. They need your help!

@sparky_buzzsaw: Ok, see, big corporations are like aircraft carriers, big and unwieldy and slow to turn, so by removing the unimportant parts like the conning tower, the engine room, the keel and all the bunks, it'll flip over in the water way faster!

@cozmicaztaway: Nailed it!

@justin258: I think the BioWare fix most folks want is another good mass effect. Shooter/RPG with good story and setting. I love Dragon Age….origins. I liked Inquisition well enough. And those old BioWare games like Kotor and Jade Empire have their charm, but Mass Effect was the biggest success they had, and what I think most folks are after when they say they want a good BioWare game. I think Witcher, Pillars, Divinty and the other RPGs have done enough to not be considered “BioWare-like” anymore.

@tartyron: If I’m being honest, I question how many ME players truly care about the shooteriness of Mass Effect. The shooting is bad in 1 and fine in 2/3, but my love for that series is almost entirely the characters, dialogue choices, codex, paragon/renegade nonsense. They could flip it to a totally different genre and I would barely care.

Presumably Mass Effect continues to be a shooter, but my hope is that after BioWare failed so badly with Anthem, maybe they’re not to be trusted with new shooter ideas for a few years, and more of their projects will be like Dragon Age/Kotor/Jade Empire. I don’t need everything to be a shooter-with-RPG-elements.

Like, give me Mass Effect but it’s an overhead tactics game like Jagged Alliance or XCOM, and I’ll play that any day of the week over the shooter Mass Effect.

@bisonhero: fair. I just meant that Mass Effect is where BioWare got….MASS APPEAL!!!!! Ahahahahaha……I’m a desperately lonely man.

But yeah, you are right, there are tons better shooters out there. I think it was just the first to hit the sweet spot of story RPG with shooting and as such is the company’s most largely identified franchise.

Dragon Age Inquisition was Bioware's most successful game shipping more than 6m copies, which is part of the problem Bioware's titles are not particularly great sellers.

Laying off writers and playtesters is probably indicative of how far away DA4 is, Bioware's leadership has consistently made awful choices.

It's disgusting that they claim to care about Dragon Age Dreadwolf's quality in the same breath as laying off 20-year veteran devs. It's pure cost-cutting and the blog post isn't shy about that.

The Bioware studio I fell in love with was hollowed out years ago. It's just a generic EA brand at this point. I still feel terrible for those left behind and hope their talents are noticed so they can find meaningful work again quickly.

Bioware seems like a shadow of its former self. It seems like they used to work on passion projects that were unique, interesting, and kinda... nerdy. Their later releases like Anthem just seemed soulless, like something cooked up in a board room to make profit. Even DA:I just wasn't great, at least to me. And the next one is apparently supposed to be a God of War-like? eh... Oh well. I'm sure the talented people from there are branching off into indie studios that will make something more interesting. Larian is showing how it's done.

This is not IGN.

@infantpipoc: 😂

The idea that BioWare from "the good old days" no longer exists or that the people who made BioWare good were all gone was mostly a myth perpetuated by people that have been trying to eulogize them for the last 10+ years, with an axe to grind against BioWare not making the cRPGs they preferred in perpetuity. The people that helped make Baldurs Gate and Dragon Age Origins were there and have always been there, up until EA started firing them en masse yesterday

In reality there are a bunch of veterans who will still be there, like Mike Gamble and Patrick/Karin Weekes. It's just that EA decided to make their lives a whole lot harder because around 6 months ago they completely restructured their accounting books and decided to gut a studio by firing the people who looked the most expensive and expendable. I'm willing to bet that the team were fighting tooth and nail to hold this off for as long as possible

At the end of the day any developer and their identity is more than any one individual in the team, and I think there's still a good chance they'll find their feet and come out the other end doing great things, but to say this fucking sucks ass would be a profound understatement

@judaspete: Come to think about it, even over there, people only defend corporate interest when said corporate interest is tied to hardware. Software companies? Well, they can be criticized all they like.

Them losing writers like Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson is gut wrenching.

I don't want to get into too many details but I grew up in the Edmonton area and Bioware holds a big place in my heart for a lot of different reasons.

Mark Darrah hopefully does a video on this eventually, maybe sooner rather than later if his contract was terminated as part of the cuts.