Mass Effect fans got horrible news last week with the announcement of BioWare's closure as well as the cancellation of Mass Effect 5 – or, as it apparently would have been called, Mass Effect Universe. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, one former dev now suggests that EA isn't likely to sell the project to another studio to finish it off, either.
The next Mass Effect game was revealed in 2020, and in the years since, we have learned very little about it. That was until shortly after BioWare's closure, when an apparent trailer for a game titled Mass Effect Universe was posted online and looked, upsettingly, good.
Romain Toutain served as franchise technical director for Mass Effect at BioWare since early 2022, and in a recent Twitch stream reacting to this trailer – which he describes as an internal trailer rather than one we were ever meant to see – he responds to a fan asking if EA could have sold the studio and its project in order to save them (translated by Bluesky user loustica-lucia and verified using machine translation).
"But EA never actually sells anything," he replies. "They just shut things down and sit on their licenses."
So earlier, my brother was watching Octobinz (Romain Toutain)'s livestream on Twitch. He was the Technical Director on Mass Effect Universe, so I wanted to share some bits he discussed. As he speaks french, I added subtitles to make it more accessible for everyone! #MassEffect #MassEffectUniverse
— @loustica-lucia.bsky.social (@loustica-lucia.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-26T12:46:10.178Z
The publisher's apparent reluctance to sell any of its IP is something that former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah previously acknowledged after plans for its $55 billion acquisition were first announced last year. At the time, he suggested that this was "in large part because the individuals who would be responsible for making those decisions, for looking for those opportunities, are actually incentivized to not take risks. They are incentivized to not be the person who sold an IP that then turned into a billion-dollar franchise."
Even so, he suggested at the time that EA might look to its "huge repository of dormant IPs" and consider selling them to help with the enormous debt it's taken on as part of the acquisition.
"You might even see them toying with the idea of shutting some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios or entire groups," he said.
Now, following BioWare's closure, he suggests that Mass Effect and Dragon Age's fate could go either way. With no one working on the series within EA, that "might make them more likely to sell off those IPs," but equally, "it might also make them more likely to try to forget that they ever existed and bury them in the vault," he says.
None of this is stopping the Mass Effect fanbase's determination to save the series, though. A petition has now surpassed 200,000 signatures, and the actors who played Commander Shepard, Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, have both publicly expressed their support.
