We cannot let Mass Effect and BioWare just disappear

1. The Reality of EA's $20 Billion Debt

You imply that the Mass Effect franchise wasn't profitable enough to pay off EA's debt load. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what just happened to this company. EA was a highly profitable, financially healthy corporation until very recently.

On August 4, 2026, Saudi Arabia's PIF and Silver Lake completed a $55 billion leveraged buyout (LBO) to take EA private. As part of the classic private equity playbook, they loaded $20 billion of debt directly onto EA's balance sheet to fund their own acquisition. EA now faces $1.8 billion a year in interest payments just to exist.

2. Prestige Projects vs. Line Items

The closure of BioWare and the cancellation of Mass Effect on October 21, 2026, is part of EA's desperate corporate mandate to strip $700 million in annual operating costs to service that LBO debt.

Mass Effect wasn't canceled because 5+ million sales is 'bad'—it was canceled because a prestige, story-driven single-player RPG that was years away from launch is an easy line item for private equity metrics to slash when they need to clear immediate cash flow.

3. False Equivalence

Comparing an iconic space opera trilogy to GTA V—the biggest statistical anomaly in entertainment history—or games like The Witcher 3 is a broken metric. Single-player RPGs are funded as prestige intellectual properties that anchor entire brand ecosystems. For a sci-fi RPG, pulling 5 million sales on a single entry or remaster is highly profitable relative to its production scale. EA is slashing long-term creative assets for immediate debt relief, plain and simple."

Based on the sales :

• Mass Effect franchise :
  • Mass Effect (2007): Sold over 2 million copies worldwide.
  • Mass Effect 2 (2010): Sold roughly 5 million copies worldwide.
  • Mass Effect 3 (2012): Sold around 6 to 7 million copies worldwide.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017): Sold roughly 3 to 5 million copies.
  • Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021): Sold around 5 million copies on Steam.
• Other EA games
  • Star Wars Jedi : Fallen Order (2019) : Sold over 10 million copies
  • The Sims 4 (2014) : Sold over 35 million copies before being Free-to-play
• Other companies :
  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025) : Sold over 6 million copies worldwide
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025) : Sold around 9 million copies worldwide.
  • Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) : Sold around 23 million copies worldwide.
  • Fallout 4 (2015) : Sold over 35 million copies worldwide.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) : Sold over 40 million copies worldwide.
  • The Witcher 3 (2015) : Sold over 65 million copies worldwide.
  • Grand Thief Auto V / GTA 5 (2015) : Sold over 230 million copies worldwide.

Mass Effect franchise isn't really a big source of revenue to pay the $20 billion debt.