Following Failure Of ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’, BioWare Announces Layoffs Ahead Of Work On Next ‘Mass Effect’ Game: “We Are Taking This Opportunity Between Full Development Cycles To Reimagine How We Work”
In a development undeniably caused at least partly by the failure of the studio’s recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has announced that in seeking to “reimagine” their operations before commencing development on the next Mass Effect game, they will be cutting an undisclosed number of employees from their workforce.
This round of pink-slipping was confirmed to the public on January 29th by BioWare General Manager Gary McKay via an entry into the company’s official blog.
“Today, we are turning towards the future and preparing for the next chapter in BioWare’s story,” wrote McKay. “As we announced in August 2023, we are changing how we build games to meet the needs of our upcoming projects and hold ourselves to the highest quality standards.”
“Now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been released, a core team at BioWare is developing the next Mass Effect game under the leadership of veterans from the original trilogy, including Mike Gamble, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, Parrish Ley, and others,” he ten explained, ostensibly raising the credentials of the returning Mass Effect devs in an attempt to distance themselves from the abysmal quality of their latest release.
To this end, McKay then revealed, “In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect, we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans. We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.”
“Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio,” he concluded. “We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.”
RELATED: ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Review – A Name Can’t Carry the Weight Alone
As referenced above, while BioWare did not publicly confirm the fact and though former studio executive producer Mark Darrah has previously noted that part of this ‘reimagining’ has to do with the understandable fact that the Mass Effect team just simply isn’t capable of either efficiently or effectively handling such an influx of new devs, a studio does not suffer such a sales disappointment as The Veilguard without seeing some form of downsizing.
In a January 22nd investor update, EA admitted that while they had previously forecast “mid-single-digit growth in live services net bookings “[defined as “the net amount of products and services sold digitally or sold-in physically”], the significant under performance of both The Veilguard and EA Sports FC 25 had led them to revise their projections, with their new outlook anticipating “a mid-single-digit decline”.
“Global Football had experienced two consecutive fiscal years of double-digit net bookings growth,” detailed company leadership. “However, the franchise experienced a slowdown as early momentum in the fiscal third quarter did not sustain through to the end. As a result, EA revises its outlook for Global Football to end the fiscal year down mid-single-digit at the midpoint of the new outlook. Separately, Dragon Age engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.”
In a comment addressed to investors, EA CEO Andrew Wilson explained, “During Q3, we continued to deliver high-quality games and experiences across our portfolio however, Dragon Age and EA SPORTS FC 25 underperformed our net bookings expectations.”
Ultimately, speculation suggests that should The Veilguard actually have sold well, it would have likely not only seen its team assigned to developing any number of DLC add-ons, but also entered at least very, very early pre-production work on a follow-up Dragon Age adventure, thus allowing for its dev team to remain intact rather than reassigned and slimmed down.
At current, the exact number of BioWare employees effected by this round of job cuts has yet to be publicly disclosed.
Meanwhile, the next Mass Effect game has yet to receive an official release date.
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