Greg Zeschuk learned BioWare’s studio was gone while he was fishing for steelhead in the Babine River in northern British Columbia. By the time he got back to the lodge, he had about ten texts and opened his phone to, in his words, “Oh sh*t.”
EA announced on Oct. 21 that it was closing the Edmonton studio and ending early development on the next Mass Effect game. The closure cost about 50 jobs at BioWare and came amid roughly 400 layoffs across EA, 78 days after EA’s $55 billion buyout closed.
Babine River and Edmonton
Zeschuk co-founded BioWare with Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip in 1995, then watched the company move through a 2007 sale to EA and into a long stretch inside a larger corporate structure. He said he did not have the immediate impact because he was not there to share in the moment, adding, “I wasn’t there to share in the moment, which in some ways was nice because I was able to kind of just take my time with it.”
That distance did not soften the verdict. Zeschuk said the leveraged buyout was the “final nail in the coffin,” and he tied the closure to people at the top of the company who, as he put it, have never “made a game.”
BioWare and EA
He also said great studios cannot be rebuilt with “random people and AI,” a blunt line that fits the larger problem here: a studio with a long identity can vanish faster than it can be replaced by management theory. Zeschuk had said in 2013 that BioWare survived within EA because the company was mature enough and had enough good people throughout to handle the “EA bear hug” and then evolve from it.
That earlier defense now reads like a fracture line. In 2013 he said, “We needed to be strong to survive that, and I think we did,” but the 2025 closure shows how thin that survival proved once the ownership structure changed again.
Mass Effect and 50 jobs
The immediate damage lands on the people who lost work, not the corporate balance sheet. Zeschuk said, “I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t suck. And I think it’s kind of sad,” and the closure also stops early work on the next Mass Effect game before it could become the company’s next anchor.
Which executives Zeschuk meant when he said they have never “made a game” is not identified, and that omission is the sharpest unresolved piece of the story. For now, the studio is closed, the job losses are counted, and the next Mass Effect game has been pushed back into silence.
