On Wednesday, EA shut down BioWare’s Edmonton studio and cancelled the next Mass Effect, a game that had been in early development for years. A day later, the game’s trailer leaked online anyway, and Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, the journalist who broke the closure story, confirmed the footage is real: two minutes of in-engine video for a game called Mass Effect: Universe that no longer exists.
The trailer plays like a proper comeback. A new protagonist, a former Alliance soldier, works alongside a geth ally, throws hands in a bar brawl to “Bad to the Bone,” and at the end runs into a familiar face: Liara T’Soni, older now, back in the frame. It closes on a “Coming Soon” card for a game that is never coming out.
The human cost is the bigger story. Bloomberg reports roughly 400 jobs cut across EA, about 50 of them at BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, gone after 30 years. BioWare said its goodbye in a statement on X the same day the closure was announced.
EA has not commented on the leak. Fans are treating the trailer as a funeral and a proof of concept at the same time: the game existed, it looked like Mass Effect, and it died in a boardroom.