The Redwood City game publisher, owned since August by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, is narrowing its focus.
Electronic Arts, the Redwood City video game publisher taken private this summer in a $55 billion deal widely described as the largest leveraged buyout on record, is cutting about 400 jobs and closing BioWare, the Canadian studio behind the Mass Effect and Dragon Age role-playing series.
The cuts amount to about 3 percent of a work force EA last reported at roughly 14,500, Variety reported; Bloomberg News put the total at about 400, with roughly 50 at BioWare, according to Reuters. The company announced the changes on Oct. 21 in an internal memo from Cam Weber, EA’s president and chief studios officer, and David Tinson, its president and chief operating officer.
The executives framed the moves as a strategic narrowing rather than a cost cut. “Our industry is changing quickly,” they wrote, describing EA as “the number one publisher in Western HD gaming” but facing more competition for players’ time. “Over the past several months, we’ve taken a hard look at our business, how we operate, and what it will take to lead in this next era of interactive entertainment.” They laid out three priorities: “Deepen Our Core,” “Expand Our Reach” and “Transform Our Business.” The memo said the company would help affected workers look for other roles inside EA and scheduled a global town hall for November.
What closes and what continues
BioWare, founded in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1995 and acquired by EA in 2007, will close along with its Edmonton offices after EA decided not to move forward with a small team’s early work on the next Mass Effect game. “BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly,” Mr. Weber and Mr. Tinson wrote. In its own farewell, the studio said, “Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending.” BioWare’s most recent release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, came out in 2024, and the studio had already shed staff in 2025.
Other projects were reshuffled. The memo said EA’s Respawn and DICE studios would collaborate on a future game, which Variety and Bloomberg identified as a new Star Wars: Battlefront. Apex Legends, Marvel’s Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game will continue, and EA Sports is developing an open-world American football project called Project Gridiron and reviving the boxing series Fight Night. In The Sims, one project, code-named Evergreen, will be prioritized while another, Lotus, is paused. The skateboarding game skate. will continue with a smaller team.
Workers at several other EA studios, including Maxis in Redwood City, Full Circle, Ripple Effect, Motive and Respawn, posted on LinkedIn that they had lost their jobs, Vertical Slice reported. EA has not published a studio-by-studio breakdown. As of the most recent state data, which lists notices through Oct. 21, no California layoff notice from EA had appeared; state law requires one only when 50 or more workers at a single site are laid off within 30 days.
The owners’ case
EA’s new owners, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, paid $210 a share in cash. When the deal closed on Aug. 4, EA described it as a move made from strength, with fiscal 2026 revenue of about $7.5 billion.
“We’re entering this next chapter from a position of strength,” said Andrew Wilson, EA’s chief executive. Egon Durban, Silver Lake’s co-chief executive, said the owners would “invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do.” Mr. Kushner said Affinity was “excited to support the company as it continues to reach new audiences.” The Public Investment Fund noted that it had been a minority investor in EA for more than five years before the buyout.
The Oct. 21 memo did not tie the layoffs to the deal, The San Francisco Chronicle noted. EA has a long history of closing studios and canceling projects under public ownership: in 2025 alone it canceled a Black Panther game, closed the studio Cliffhanger Games and dropped a Titanfall project.
The debt and the critics
The buyout was financed in part with debt, about $18 billion of it according to Bloomberg, and labor advocates warned from the start that the borrowing could lead to cuts. In October 2025, shortly after the deal was announced, United Videogame Workers-CWA, a union of game developers, said, “If jobs are lost or studios are closed due to this deal, that would be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors’ pockets — not to strengthen the company.”
EA’s leaders describe the changes as a reallocation, not a retreat. The memo said EA Sports “continues to operate from a position of strength” and that the company is “fully committed and investing in the global growth of our FC franchise.” In action games, it said, EA “will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects.”
The cuts come amid a broad contraction in the game industry, which has also seen large layoffs at Microsoft’s Xbox division, Bungie and Epic Games, according to The Verge.
A Bay Area company, reshaped
EA was founded in San Mateo in 1982 by Trip Hawkins and has its headquarters at Redwood Shores. For the Bay Area, the restructuring is mostly a story of what survives: Maxis and The Sims remain in Redwood City, though with at least one project shelved.
For BioWare’s fans, the closing ends a three-decade run. Amazon’s planned Mass Effect television series remains in development, IGN has reported, but the studio that created the franchise will not be making its next game.
Wendell Yamashiro covers business, technology, labor, trade and the Bay Area economy for Trade and Commerce. More from Wendell Yamashiro
