Star Wars Battlefront III was the straw that broke BioWare's back

Last week, amid mass layoffs, Electronic Arts shut down its beloved video game studio BioWare, the makers of Mass Effect, which EA had acquired in 2007. It was always an odd fit, what with Madden players so commonly stuffing Dragon Age gamers in lockers. Nevertheless, it produced popular and influential games before a downturn in quality over the last decade. EA’s $18 billion debt from its recent $55 billion Saudi-, Kushner-, private equity-backed leveraged buyout didn’t help. With late-stage capitalism edging ever closer to doomsday capitalism, according to Bloomberg, EA was left with a choice: Finish its new, deep-in-production Mass Effect—knowing it could be another huge, embarrassing failure like 2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda—or begin development on Star Wars Battlefront III. It chose the latter. Try as they did to nickel-and-dime its players into bankruptcy through in-game purchases, EA needs a hit, and Mass Effect simply isn’t a sure-enough bet. So EA is rerouting resources that would go into finishing Mass Effect to start development on Battlefront III, a safer I.P. play to follow 2017’s Battlefront II.