The era of BioWare is over, but SWTOR is still alive and kicking, and we don’t think this cash cow nerf is going away anytime soon.
BioWare Closes
After nearly a decade of exorbitant failures, BioWare announced on X that it’s finally closing its doors and that the next Mass Effect game it was working on has been cancelled.
The clear downfall of BioWare began with the poor reception of Mass Effect: Andromeda back in 2017, followed by Anthem’s severely mismanaged seven-year development that culminated in an unfinished game in 2019, and most recently with mixed reception and poor sales on Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.
In total, EA is laying off roughly 400 people (3% of their workforce) at the behest of the company’s new private owners including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners.
It’s easy to kneejerk blame this sort of thing on private equity, but it’s remarkable that BioWare was able to survive years after three subsequent AAA flops and EA’s 2023 restructuring.
Lately, larger publishers like Microsoft and Sony have been comparatively trigger-happy with layoffs and shuttering studios they just bought if even smaller projects they funded weren’t smash hits.
SWTOR Lives On
As part of that 2023 restructuring at EA, development on SWTOR was moved from BioWare Austin to Broadsword Online Games. It’s still the same people in Austin, Texas, working on the game, they basically just put a new sign out in front of the building.
Way back then, IGN broke the news about SWTOR’s move and reported according to the leaker that “more than half” of the 70-80 people on the development team would be making the move.
BioWare General Manager Gary McKay and SWTOR’s Executive Producer Keith Kanneg both stated in press releases after the fact that “most of the current team” would continue working on SWTOR.
We won’t be able to do a proper headcount until we can compare the credits from SWTOR’s imminent 8.0 “Masters of the Force” expansion to the ones for 7.0 “Legacy of the Sith”, but based on the scope and pacing of the content they released before and after the transition, it seems safe to say that the size of the team has remained the same.
Broadsword, EA, and SWTOR’s Future
Broadsword Online Games is considered a third-party studio because it isn’t owned by EA but is contracted by EA to maintain older IP and creative licenses it owns, of which SWTOR is the largest project Broadsword manages by far since its migration in mid-2023.
SWTOR’s developers declined to comment when we asked awhile back, but we get the impression that SWTOR is basically self-funded now, perhaps with EA taking a cut of the profits and a slice of the revenue for the publishing services they provide, like billing and account management.
Since EA is now a private company (owned by private equity), it isn’t subject to the quarterly whims and woes of shareholders, and SWTOR’s third-party arrangement with Broadsword insulates it further from corporate meddling.
Even though private equity is known for destroying companies by saddling them with the debt used to buy them, the Saudis’ Public Investment Fund (PIF) isn’t designed for that purpose, nor for asset liquidation.
The point of the PIF is to diversify the country’s holdings away from oil by using their wealth to buy into other industries like entertainment to maintain their lavish lifestyle long after their oil wells run dry and civilization moves to more sustainable sources of energy.
Of course, all that assumes SWTOR continues to turn a profit, and live-service games are notoriously tricky to pull off, but I’m not worried. SWTOR has been around for 15 years with continued development and outlasted higher profile live-service games like Destiny 2, thanks to its strong IP and exceptional business model.
While optional, SWTOR’s $15/month subscription has never, ever yielded enough content to justify its price. No live service game has delivered on offering a new AAA game’s worth of content every few months ($15×4 months=$60).
Modern games just can’t get away with charging something like that. To put it in perspective, Microsoft charges the same amount for their Premium and PC-only tiers of Xbox Game Pass as SWTOR does for its monthly subscription.
It’s not just the subscription, either. Most games with a F2P model have to cultivate their own demand for cosmetics in the cash shop by doing things like telling stories with the characters like Overwatch and League of Legends do, or license out other IP crossovers like Fortnite.
SWTOR has effectively exclusive rights to sell official digital Star Wars action figures that are highly customizable and they get massive bumps in customer traffic whenever a new movie, TV show, or other game comes out without needing to sink money in expensive TV shows like League of Legends’ “Arcane”.
So long as Star Wars remains one of the most popular franchises in the world, SWTOR will continue to be an asset, not a liability. The sheer immensity of SWTOR’s ever-expanding content trumps its age. It would be cheaper to rebuild the game to the technical extent possible rather than start from scratch with a sequel and a necessarily worse business model.
Upcoming Star Wars Games
We’re on the heels of the releases of Star Wars: Zero Company and Star Wars: Galactic Racer with several major titles we know are in development.
Jedi: Cal Kestis 3
The third installment in the Star Wars Jedi trilogy starring Cal Kestis, following Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor, it continues to be developed by a team at Respawn, the folks behind Titanfall and Apex Legends. It is widely anticipated to release sometime in 2027, though at the time of publishing, no release date has been announced
Fate of the Old Republic
Fate of the Old Republic has just started development at the new Arcanaut Studios helmed by BioWare alum Casey Hudson. It remains to be seen whether Hudson was a part of what made BioWare great, or someone who was cast overboard early in an attempt to keep BioWare’s ship afloat.
Arcanaut has numerous positions open and is also based in Canada, so it’s likely that those roles will be filled in short order by BioWare castaways.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how they reconcile SWTOR with FOTOR, especially given the latter is de-facto canon.
SWTOR, however, is in a more nebulous position where it’s assumed to be part of the non-canon legends continuity based on its initial release date, but entire story arcs have been released since then, including all of KOTFE, KOTET, Onslaught, and Legacy of the Sith.
Battlefront 3
Confirmed by Variety, Battlefront 3 is being co-developed by Respawn and DICE, the latter of which are the same people who made the recent Star Wars Battlefront games and are well-known for the Battlefield franchise.
Battlefront 2 is infamous for its pricing model before launch and EA’s explanation being the most downvoted comment ever on Reddit.
Support for Battlefront 2 ended in early 2020, shortly after the release of Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker, but the game experienced a huge surge in popularity in summer 2025, likely driving the decision to fund a third installment.
KOTOR Remake
The KOTOR remake has faced a tumultuous development likely owing to the fact that Lucasfilm originally tapped Aspyr Media for the project, despite their experience being console and app store ports and remasters of ancient games, not full-fledged AAA remakes.
They’re now working on a remaster of a Shrek 2 game that was originally churned out for PS2.
Development was handed off to Saber Interactive who is starting from scratch. The timeline is a bit fuzzy, but it looks like the changeover happened in 2022, but Saber Interactive broke from their and Aspyr’s shared parent company Embracer Group and took the game with them in 2024.
Eclipse
Eclipse is a telltale-style game being developed by Quantic Dream, the French folks behind games like Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls.
Quantic Dream confirmed to IGN in July 2026 that this game they announced all the way back in 2021 is still in development.
“The development of Star Wars Eclipse is continuing as planned, with the full commitment of its team and all the necessary resources to complete its mission.”
Quantic Dream via IGN
SWTOR 8.0
SWTOR’s 8.0 expansion “Masters of the Force” is due out this holiday 2026. We expect the release date to be either December 8th or 15th, though it could be pushed back until after the holidays like 7.0 if they aren’t ready before going on break.
Everything We Know About SWTOR 8.0
