More than 300,000 fans signed a petition begging EA to keep Mass Effect from a quiet death in its vault. Casey Hudson, who directed the original trilogy, says he’s optimistic the series will live on. The leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party wants Ottawa to help BioWare’s laid-off developers buy the studio and run it themselves. And one of BioWare's founders says he's already running the numbers on a rescue.

The outcry has been voluminous and passionate in the wake of the sudden and shocking closure of BioWare.

But bringing back the beloved studio and franchise is going to take more than heart, signatures, and a politician’s social post. It’s also going to need $200 million or more, according to two of the people who built BioWare and an industry analyst. 

That may not be possible. But there’s a less expensive route that could be.

“It's nice to have these sorts of ideas, but who's going to supply the $200 million pot of money to make the game?” said BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. “That's really, I think, the crux of it: Is it economically the best place for someone to invest? I know I sound harsh about it, but that's the challenge.”

The $200 Million Question

It isn’t just Zeschuk who thinks creating the next Mass Effect would cost $200 million. Trent Oster, a member of BioWare’s founding team who co-founded the Edmonton studio Beamdog, reached the same ballpark figure.

“The scary component of Mass Effect is the audience is going to want the best of AAA development,” he wrote on Twitter on Nov. 5. “Rough ballpark (based on contemporaries) is $200M+. That is a big number to commit up front.”

I reached out to Joost van Dreunen, who teaches the business of games at NYU Stern and writes the SuperJoost Playlist newsletter, to get a sense of the numbers. He said a fully loaded developer in Canada (which would include salary, benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and software) costs between C$125,000 and C$155,000 a year. That works out to about US$7,500 to US$9,300 a month per person.

"A Mass Effect-scale game is a different category," van Dreunen wrote. "You're looking at 200 to 300 people over five to six years, plus heavy outsourcing. That puts development alone somewhere between US$150 million and US$250 million, before a dollar is spent on marketing."

And that money covers one game, not a studio, he said. 

"To earn back US$200 million in development plus marketing, you'd need to sell around 7 million copies. BioWare has done that before, but not recently."

The last time that happened was with BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, which sold more than 12 million copies since its 2014 release. The studio’s most recent release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard reached about 1.5 million players in its launch quarter, about half of what EA was expecting.

Oster, for one, doesn't think money alone was the problem. "EA has had two, well-funded swings at making RPGs with Andromeda and Veilguard," he wrote on X on Nov. 10.

This isn’t an issue unique to BioWare, Zeschuk pointed out. 

"You can look back at the last few giant releases of huge RPGs from storied studios and see they've all had challenges," he said. "You look at Starfield, you look at the original Cyberpunk, and these are great developers that are in their wheelhouse. It's super hard to do."

That makes it an investment hard to justify from a business perspective, he said.

"Is it even worth it?” he said. “Why do I want to take this risk? And especially if I don't have this seasoned, experienced group doing it, the difficulty level just keeps going up and up."

Former Mass Effect director Casey Hudson learned that the hard way. After leaving BioWare in 2020, he started Humanoid Origin, and announced that the new studio was working on a new AAA science fiction game. It shut down in November 2024, before the game shipped, due to an “unexpected shortfall of funding.”

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Rockstar can spend whatever it costs to make Grand Theft Auto 6, Zeschuk said, because its return is almost guaranteed. 

"Unless they can somehow magically mess it up, they'll get their money back in spades," he said. "But most other people are like, 'Oh, I'll make a new IP and take a risk.' And who knows, right?"

What's For Sale?

Money issue aside, there’s perhaps a bigger issue facing any attempt to save the studio and game: What’s actually for sale.

When the studio closure was announced on Oct. 21 by Electronic Arts, the company wrote that it had decided “not to move forward” with the early development on the next Mass Effect. And that they would be “closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace.” About 50 BioWare employees lost their jobs, part of roughly 400 cuts across the company.

Bloomberg later reported that EA chose to fund Star Wars Battlefront 3 over the next Mass Effect while cutting costs after its $55 billion buyout by a group led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. An EA spokesperson told Bloomberg the decision was made "collectively" after months of review. "While this is never easy, we ultimately have to make tough decisions," the spokesperson said.

EA still owns the BioWare name and the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, and a Mass Effect TV series is in development at Amazon. Asked whether it would sell or license the name or the rights, EA spokesperson Justin Higgs said the company had "no additional comments or information to share" beyond its closure note.

Without the ability to purchase or license the franchise or studio name, “buying BioWare” really just means funding a new studio built with former BioWare staff. And Oster argued that even if you could get the rights to create a new Mass Effect, the deal would only work as part of a larger strategy.

"There has to be a bigger plan in place for the IP to make the math work," he wrote.

I asked Zeschuk if he’d have any interest in leading such an effort or would want to buy the name and the rights himself.

"No. No," he said, with little pause. "I'd love to see it continue, but I'm not the one for it. And I also don't know how. I think the challenge with it is it creates this giant web of complexity on how you execute it."

Time Costs Money

The biggest expense in game development isn’t technology: It’s time. It’s also the hardest thing to predict.

"A year of delay costs whatever the team burns in a year," van Dreunen wrote. 

That means that for a 50-person studio in Canada, it would be burning through about US$4.5 million to US$5.6 million in a year. For a 250-person team, that skyrockets to US$22 million to US$28 million.

“Plus,” he added, “re-spent marketing and a year of revenue you don’t get.”

And that extra time pays for itself only when it sells enough extra copies to cover the delay, he said. At roughly US$40 net per copy, the 50-person team needs about 125,000 extra sales to break even. The bigger team needs closer to 600,000 to 700,000.

Despite that high cost, there are studios that will do exactly that, like Nintendo, Zeschuk said.  The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was delayed from 2022 to 2023, but ultimately sold 10 million copies in three days.

"They actually decided to sit on it for a year and refine it," he said, "polishing every sharp edge off it. And I'm just like, well, that's what we should be doing."

“At that scale,” van Dreunen wrote, “a year of payroll is a rounding error.”

Alternatively, a studio might spend time following a game’s release fixing it. That’s what happened with CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077. Despite several delays, the game shipped so broken that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation store. But years of patches and the release of the Phantom Liberty expansion ultimately saved the game, which has now sold more than 40 million copies.

"The time gets spent either way," van Dreunen wrote, "but spending it before launch protects the full-price sales window, whereas spending it post-launch means paying double to repair damaged franchise equity."

Zeschuk credits CD Projekt for sticking with it, but said most studios can't afford to take that path.

"Imagine if they had done that in the first place, but there's no way they have the time and the money," he said. "You need that period of polish. Otherwise you're just throwing something out and hoping, which is what most people do, including us at times."

Through that lens, BioWare’s Anthem can be viewed as a bit of a cautionary tale. After years of changing direction, the game was mostly built in about 12 to 16 months, according to a 2019 Kotaku investigation, and it never recovered from that launch.

The Edmonton Problem

One of the points of saving BioWare is to keep it in its Edmonton location. But Edmonton is one of the most expensive places in Canada to try and rebuild a game studio.

Where most Canadian provinces offer refundable tax credits on game development labor, Alberta offers none. If the move were aimed at reopening the studio in Ontario, that state’s refundable tax credits would cover 35 to 40 percent of eligible spending. In Quebec it’s 30 to 37.5 percent, and in British Columbia it’s 25 percent of salaries.

"Depending on the province, you'll be able to get a tax credit on labor costs, varying anywhere from 0 percent in Alberta to 40 percent in Ontario," van Dreunen wrote. On a 50-person, four-year project, “a 40 percent credit cuts the labor bill by about a third.”

Alberta's stance on game development tax credits has flipped and flopped over the years. The province's NDP government created a game development tax credit in 2018, and the UCP government that followed scrapped it in 2019. The UCP later promised a new one, then dropped that plan in March 2025, saying "a sector-specific boutique tax credit is not the best use of taxpayer dollars." BioWare itself had even lobbied for one.

But the loss of BioWare goes well beyond the finances, Zeschuk said. For years, BioWare was the reason young people in the city wanted to make games.

"A lot of people ask me, ‘How do I get into the game industry? My kid wants to get in,’" he said. "And they'll say, 'I really want to work at BioWare.' It was like this aspirational goal. And that's kind of gone, right?"

Public money for game studios has a mixed record in Canada. In 2010, Silicon Knights, the Ontario studio behind Eternal Darkness, received a nearly $4 million federally backed loan to build a new AAA game and add more than 65 jobs to the region. Two years later, it had laid off most of its staff, and a new studio formed by former Silicon Knights staff, including its founder, bought its desks, chairs and wiped computers. Officials declined to say at the time how much of the loan was repaid.

But the best-known cautionary tale is American. In 2010, Rhode Island guaranteed a $75 million loan to lure Curt Schilling's 38 Studios to Providence. The studio collapsed two years later, leaving the state with the bill.

Worker-Owned AAA

When he reacted to news of the closure on social media, NDP leader Avi Lewis framed it as a lesson about ownership. 

"This is private equity, this is what it does. Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit," he wrote in a series of posts after EA's announcement on Oct. 21.

“The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio,” he continued. “They know how to make the games we all love. They should be given the first opportunity - and the federal support - to buy it and run it themselves.”

What Lewis didn’t talk about is how much money he had in mind or how the federal support would work. Neither the NDP nor Lewis responded to requests for comment. The NDP also doesn’t hold enough seats to move the idea through Parliament.

Lewis isn't the only New Democrat pushing the idea. NDP MP Don Davies is sponsoring a House of Commons e-petition calling for financial support to help BioWare become independent of EA, including control of its intellectual property. Oster replied to Davies on Twitter that "we should have a chat."

Zeschuk said he loved the “affection” behind the idea, but noted that even BioWare at its peak decided not to carry the risk of big projects on its own. When the founders sold the studio to EA in 2007, it was partly to pay for the online game Star Wars: The Old Republic that it was building in Austin.

"A lot of [the sale] had to do with sort of funding the Star Wars project in Austin and also just the stability of being in a bigger company," he said. "We saw there'd be value in being part of something bigger rather than going our own way and taking all the risks."

A worker-owned studio would face the same problem, van Dreunen wrote, and a harder one when it comes to publishers.

"A publisher putting US$150 million or more into a game wants control: milestone approvals, ownership of the IP, and the right to replace leadership if the project goes sideways," he said. "A worker-owned studio with flat decision-making and equal pay has a hard time offering that. It also has a hard time recruiting senior AAA talent at market rates."

The best examples of worker-owned studios tend to be small. France's Motion Twin, the co-op behind Dead Cells, had about 10 people when the game took off. Later, its ongoing development moved to a new studio, Evil Empire, which dropped the co-op model. In Montreal, the worker-run studio KO_OP laid off 13 people in September after failing to find funding for new projects, van Dreunen noted.

Where a co-op does make sense, he said, is a smaller game. 

"A game in the US$10 million to US$30 million range, the Expedition 33 tier,” he said. “For AAA, it would probably need to set up a separate entity for that one game and give the publisher conventional control over it."

What Might Work

It’s that smaller tier where real opportunity might be. And it’s Expedition 33 that everyone seems to point to as the working example.

Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cost less than $10 million to develop, the studio told The New York Times, and sold more than 8 million copies. Van Dreunen credits that success to a lean core team, off-the-shelf engine technology and a distinctive art style.

"The lesson isn't that every game should cost US$10 million," he said. "It's that ambition and art direction can do a lot of what headcount used to do."

Zeschuk sees the success tied deeply to the fact that the team already knew how to work together.

"They were also a team that, my understanding, had worked together as a group before," he said.

And that, he argues, was always BioWare's real asset. Not the name or the franchises, but people who spent years learning together and getting better at the craft.

"When I say it's the people, it's the people and their organizational knowledge," Zeschuk said. "I bet you if you look back to the teams on Elden Ring and [Baldur’s Gate 3], you'll see people that have been working on the same thing for 20 years. And to a large degree, that's what first-gen, second-gen BioWare was. These were people that worked for 15 years on the same problem and continued to evolve it. And when they come out, a new person comes in, they've had two years on that problem."

Trent Oster thinks a version of Mass Effect could be built that way, and he's already recruiting.

"I think it can be done well for less than that amount with a disciplined approach and an experienced team," he wrote on Nov. 5. Days later, he publicly asked former BioWare creative director James Ohlen to join him.

"Of course!" Ohlen replied on Twitter. "A chance to work on Dragon Age again is a dream of mine."

Since then, Oster has been running financial scenarios in Excel, posting on Nov. 10 that he was on "revision #51." But he's clear that the rights are essential. "One without the other is just making EA money," he wrote.

To some extent, that team-focused rebuild is already happening in Edmonton, but without the BioWare name. Former BioWare developers run Beamdog and smaller studios and tool companies around the city. Beamdog itself is owned by Embracer through subsidiary Aspyr.

If Ottawa or Alberta wants to save something, those teams may be a better bet: a mid-size group of veterans, a new game, a publisher partner, and public support.

Personally, Zeschuk doesn't see BioWare as gone. He sees it as scattered.

"It's not like it's gone, but there's no shining light, right?" he said. "There's a lot of cool people doing good stuff. It lives on in smaller pieces."

Oster hopes it can also live on at the studio. "In 1994 a few of us began the journey that was BioWare," he wrote on Twitter on Nov. 11. "I think there are many stories yet to be told."