Report: BioWare Has Shrunk Down to Under 100 Employees - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 February 2025 / 7,428 Views
This week it was announced BioWare is undergoing a restructuring now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been released and a core team works on the next Mass Effect game. The studio has worked over the last few months to move employees to other teams at Electronic Arts that had open roles.
Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has now reported BioWare has shrunk down to under 100 employees.
Schreier claims that "dozens" of BioWare employees were told they would temporarily be allocated to other Electronic Arts projects following the launch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. However, EA has now told the employees the transfers are permanent. It is reported several employees aren't pleased with this.
It is claimed BioWare will staff back up once the next Mass Effect gets further into production.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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Ooph, also means the game is very far away
They made the right move, cut the fat from the Veilguard team, and move only the best devs from the Veilguard team over to the small team that has been developing Mass Effect. Now they have a hopefully solid foundation of almost 100 devs on Mass Effect which they can build on with future hiring. Hopefully they can lure back some of the former Bioware veterans who left to make their own studios but struggled in this market and ended up seeing their new studios closed.
If they have 100 employees, they have less than 100 developers. Not everybody that works for the studio is developing software.
But, yeah, it obviously makes sense to move people to other places where their skills can be better used.
There's still likely lots of dead wood on the Mass Effect team, working on all the most repulsive character creation sliders, like saddlebag jiggle, and gunt-to-thigh ratio.
Hopefully Bioware and EA have learned their lesson on that, but we will find out in a few years when the gameplay reveal trailer drops I guess.
Wow, and they used to be a major player in gaming, now it seems they are barely still alive with this news.
the AAA gaming environment has become unsustainable due to the extreme risk factor in making games. Unfortunate consequence of this is seeing all these once great studios — such as Ubisoft, Bungie, and now BioWare — crumble to the ground.
I don't see how you can say that Ubisoft or Bungie have crumbled to the ground. That's extremely hyperbolic.
Isn’t Ubisoft literally on the verge of being bought out? (Worth noting: Their stock price has dropped 85% over the past 5y…) AC:S is like their last hope atm. Haven’t heard great things regarding Bungie either, tho im not as informed on their situation.
So, making ME game is more ceremonial I guess.
Nah I wouldn't even say that, Bioware just really sucks now and obviously can't put out a good game to save their studio. This is probably a last ditch effort before they inevitably get cooked. I personally wish they would just go ahead and get shut down before we get yet another bad Mass Effect game that tarnishes the legacy even more than Andromeda already did.
as bad as this is for bioware, its not really much to EA. Their issue is mostly just poorly performing FC 2024 and Apex Legends falling off.
It’s called a “soft closure”
To prevent negative press and harm to sales, they don’t close the studio, merely downsize or open a “second location” which happens to be an office inside the building of another studio. Then have this new micro-studio assist other projects without having to close the studio.
What an absolute joke this developer has become,
No more chances fuck bioware
Wow. While that sucks for anyone being displaced or laid off, maybe it's a good thing for the studio; they've been so big for so long now that it must have been hard to manage and direct effectively. Downsizing could take the pressure off and allow them to finally cook again. Doesn't mean much if they have another flop and get completely shut down, though.
Someone mentioned 72 people at Bioware.... a year ago they had over 200... go back to 2010, and they had over 800 employee's. I don't think most people understand, how much bioware shrunk compaired to its glory days.
That 800 includes a massive studio making an MMO that had very little to do with single player games at the time
And it would also have included the now-defunct Montreal studio that handled Andromeda.
I don't think massive layoffs over the years is what's going to take the pressure off anyone unfortunately
