When Jackdaw first discovered BioWare video games sixteen years ago, it was not just the battles or lore that hooked him.
“It was the level of freedom and ultimately, the moral ambiguity in their characters, in the choices,” said Jackdaw, a YouTube content creator, noting that it was four years after the initial discovery that his deep-rooted love for the publisher took hold. “I felt at the time, few games had captured or grasped that in a way that BioWare had done.”
Now that same creative spirit feels fragile.
On Sept. 29, Electronic Arts, which owns BioWare, announced plans to go private. An investor Consortium consisting of big-name investors such as Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners will purchase Electronic Arts, for $55 billion, the largest leveraged buyout in history.
Since the reveal, the Redwood, California-based video game company’s stock prices have surged by more than a third to beyond $200 a share. The stock will likely continue to trade near the $210 per share offer until the deal either goes through or falls apart, according to a note from Colin Sebastian, a senior research analyst at Baird.
Some industry analysts and consumers are worried about what this means for the future of not only the games but also the developers under EA’s umbrella. BioWare, known for its role-playing series such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, has been widely recognized by the industry for its LGBTQ+ and inclusive stories. Now the company may be at risk because of Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian views on these rights.
“You wonder, how is a studio like BioWare going to continue to tell the stories that the studio is known for under ownership like this?” asked Michael Futter, co-founder of F-Squared, a video game consulting company.
Main Characters from BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Its cultural success with some has, in recent years, struggled to translate to game sales. For the past 11 years, since BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that was a hit with fans and critics alike, the studio has slowly been struggling to recapture that spark.
The company’s last three new releases: Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, while garnering a robust following, also underperformed by selling poorly or having bad reviews.
“Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed — the competitive dynamics of the single-player RPG market and EA Sports FC 25 started strong, but softened through the holiday period,” said Stuart Canfield, EA’s CFO, in a call with analysts in February.
Mass Effect Andromeda received a mixed critical reception with a Metacritic score of 71, compared to the original trilogy’s scores in the 90s. Anthem, released in 2019, was plagued by technical issues and disappointing sales, leading EA to cancel Anthem Next, an update meant to overhaul the game in 2021.
BioWare was once one of the games industry’s crown jewels of developers, releasing hit after hit like the fantasy role-playing game, Dragon Age: Origins or the military sci-fi epic, Mass Effect. The studio had made a name for itself by accruing acclaim for developing diverse character-centric stories in brand-new IPs.
In Mass Effect, players could form same-sex relationships that carried emotional weight that was tied to the story itself in the form of Liara T’Soni from Mass Effect, an Asari scientist who can form a same-sex romance with a female Commander Shepard.
Jackdaw recalls his hours spent in conversation with a host of characters from Dragon Age: Inquisition, like Cole, a spirit rogue, who was confirmed by Trick Weekes, his writer, to be neurodivergent and Dorian Pavus, an openly gay mage from the Tevinter Imperium, whose father tried to change his sexuality via blood magic.
These conversations with party members come “across in a more morally ambiguous, beautiful way that Dragon Age has always been defined for,” according to Jackdaw.
“It’s allowing us all to understand these topics with moral ambiguity,” he continued.
Now, anxiety hangs in the air, amplified by who the new owners of BioWare will be in just a few months.
“Our mission, values, and commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged,” EA said in an SEC filing.
However, even before this purchase, the studio and fans of the games have faced harassment from online groups, upset at the alleged politicizing of the games.
“There has always been an effort to say that any positive portrayal of, for instance, queer or trans people is advancing some kind of political agenda, and that the only neutral, sort of family-friendly or otherwise reasonable approach is to not portray people in positive ways and not to portray LGBT people as existing at all,” said Alejandra Cross, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Washington’s Information School.
According to Cross, who has studied online harassment in these spaces, if the online hate mob is loud and visible enough, it can “scare a company into thinking that they are under attack by a very large group of people.”
The Saudi-led Consortium will take full control of EA and have a significant influence on how the video game giant develops its games.
This transaction, valued at $210 a share, includes $36 billion in equity and JPMorgan Chase Bank providing $20 billion of debt financing.
This leveraged buyout structure is what has analysts concerned. Such pressures often lead to cost-cutting measures like layoffs and a stronger focus on predictable, high-margin properties such as EA Sports, one of the company’s core franchises, according to Martin Szumski, an associate equity analyst at Morningstar.
Such financial pressures could reshape the company’s creative priorities, particularly in BioWare, a studio known for taking risks and developing single-player narrative games.
EA’s is estimated to end fiscal year 2026 with an average revenue of $8 billion.
In EA’s latest earnings report, the Redwood, California-based video game company saw a 9.2% year-over-year decline in net revenue to $1.84 billion. Net income fell to $137 million. That amounted to 54 cents a share.
EA’s major saving grace was the company’s live service games, which made up 66% of the company’s total revenue, totaling $1.2 billion.
The company’s core offerings, which include sports franchises and shooter games like Apex Legends and Battlefield, were among EA’s top earners. The former had double-digit sales growth. Players returned to EA Sports Madden NFL 26, with the game delivering net bookings this quarter from last year. The recently released EA Sports FC 26 is also performing better than last year’s release compared in the same time frame.
With the amount of debt that EA will take on, the company is more likely to increase monetization across all of its properties, according to Szumski.
“The sports games are already pretty monetized but I’m sure they’ll come up with new and different ways to do so,” he said.
But the cost-cutting measures of layoffs Szumski mentioned have already become apparent. The company announced in January that Dragon Age: The Veilguard underperformed by 50%. A week later, BioWare announced that it had moved many of its staff to different positions inside of EA, as it does not “require support from the full studio” to make Mass Effect 5.
EA executives instructed BioWare to pivot Dragon Age: The Veilguard from a single-player game to an online live service game, a Bloomberg report highlighted. After the pandemic and the failure of Anthem, BioWare changed gears and returned to focus on making it a single-player game again. Staff did not get the necessary transition period to make the shift and instead had to work on tight deadlines and make the game appeal to a “wide a market as possible.”
“The studio was trying to keep up with what EA executives wanted from the game,” said Futter.
What is clear is that BioWare’s fate will serve as a bellwether for the broader industry, testing whether artistry and inclusivity can survive when financial engineering takes the helm. And with the Dragon Age team all but gone, some fans have rallied around the idea of another publisher buying BioWare.
“The best reality would be that it gets sold off,” said Jackdaw. “Hypothetically, I would love for BioWare to be bought out by a studio that somehow, somewhere, cares about Mass Effect enough for them to bring it on and have the investment [in the game].”