Bioware To Lay Off “Approximately 50” Employees And Other Changes To Become More "Agile" and "Focused"

Things are changing at BioWare, according to a recent post on the company’s blog. Today, the company’s General Manager, Gary McKay, published a post titled “An Update on the State of BioWare”. Reading the post, it won’t take more than two paragraphs to get what it’s about to lay out for you. The company is announcing layoffs. Specifically, it’s announcing that around 50 roles at the company are to be eliminated.

These layoffs are, according to the post, part of a “shift towards a more agile and more focused studio”. This shift is intended to “allow [their] developers to iterate quickly, unlock more creativity, and form a clear vision of what [they’re] building before development ramps up”.

The good-ish news here is that BioWare is hoping a portion of these employees will take up some of the open positions available throughout its parent company EA, but they also know that not everyone will be offered one of these jobs. In those cases, Bioware is offering employees impacted by the layoff resources and assistance while they try to find something else. The post does not say what form this will take.

As for how this will affect game production, McKay states the Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will be worthy of the franchise. As for the next Mass Effect game, pre-production continues. The post doesn’t mention Star Wars: The Old Republic, since the MMORPG is changing developers anyway, so we can probably assume this change primarily impacts the single-player games.