The Sims: EA, Lotus Projesine Ara Verdi ve Evergreen Projesine Geri Döndü

EA has paused development on Project Lotus, a second The Sims game, in the restructure that also closes BioWare and cuts around 400 jobs.

The Sims keeps one unannounced project and loses the other. EA says it is concentrating on Project Evergreen and giving that team more time to reach the full vision for the game, and the way it is paying for that time is by stopping work on Lotus. The same staff note carries the canceled new Mass Effect and the closure of BioWare, a smaller skate. team, and a joint project between Respawn and DICE. Bloomberg put the total cuts at about 400 roles across the company.

EA calls the Lotus decision a pause. The Eurogamer write-up called it a cancellation of an unannounced Sims project, and neither word comes with a date attached, because EA has never confirmed what Lotus was. Project Evergreen has no release window either. What the note does say is that Evergreen is the long-term bet for the franchise, which puts a second Sims title on hold for as long as that takes.

The pause lands while The Sims 4 is working through Sims 4’s year of fixes, the quality-of-life roadmap EA published for 2026. The first phase runs March to August and targets Sim autonomy, infant and caregiver behaviour, crashes tied to data loss, and sleeping animations, with around 55 fixes in the March patch alone. A second phase from September to December covers dining behaviour and family trees. A game more than a decade old is being repaired on a published schedule while its successor waits.

The Sims is the one game on this list that gets played in my house, so a paused Sims project reads closer to home than a cancelled RPG does. Evergreen has been the open question for years, and this is the first time EA has put the rest of the lineup behind it on paper.

The memo that carries all of this is built around three stated priorities: deepen the core, expand reach, transform the business. Chief executive David Tinson and chief strategy officer Cam Weber open with thanks, claim the top position in Western HD gaming, then move to the reasoning. Players have more choices for their time, competition is tightening, and the growth EA wants sits outside the markets and business models it has been strongest in. Asia gets named directly under the expansion priority, and the third priority is about building sports products around teams and athletes rather than around games.

BioWare gets one paragraph in that document. A small team had been in early development on Mass Effect; EA decided not to move forward, and that decision closed the studio and the Edmonton workspace. BioWare’s own statement listed Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Anthem before confirming the closure, after more than thirty years of work. Roughly 50 of the 400 cuts land there.

“BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre.”

— Cam Weber and David Tinson

Mass Effect 5 had been public since late 2020, when a cinematic teaser showed Liara T’Soni pulling N7 armour out of the snow. The last real material was the Mass Effect 5 artworks hidden behind an N7 Day blog post in November 2025, reached through letters fans decrypted out of the text itself. The image showed a scarred Krogan leading helmeted fighters under the title Civil War, which fans read as a consequence of the genophage cure from Mass Effect 3 playing out centuries later. Franchise director Mike Gamble used the same post to answer the ownership rumours head-on.

“Are we now 100% on Mass Effect? Also yes.”

— Mike Gamble

I read the memo looking for the franchise outside that one paragraph and did not find it. Mass Effect appears once in a document about EA’s next decade, in the sentence that ends it.

Andromeda, from 2017, remains the most recent Mass Effect release. Tom Taylorson, who voiced Scott Ryder, says the publisher pushed that game out before it was finished and forced it onto Frostbite when much of BioWare Montreal had no experience with the toolset. He said the cancellation of further Andromeda work hurt most, because it meant Ryder was never coming back. Nine years later the same decision has been made again, one scale up.

skate. survives with fewer people. The memo credits the early access reboot with bringing players in and then says the team needs to keep them there, which means restructuring the studio into a smaller group working to a narrower roadmap. Like The Sims, it keeps its place in the lineup and loses headcount to hold it.

Battlefield 6 is the reason the shooter side came through this intact. EA says it will take what it learned from that launch and the live service into a wider shooter portfolio, and that Respawn and DICE will collaborate on a future project it has not named. Apex Legends keeps its investment, with new multiplayer modes promised over the next few years. Rumblings this week pointed at a Star Wars: Battlefront follow-up, and the note says nothing either way.

Marvel’s Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game are still coming. Past those two, EA says it will run fewer large-scale action-adventure projects simultaneously so that each one gets the company’s full weight. That sentence is the clearest statement in the whole document about how many expensive bets EA wants running at once, and the same logic explains Lotus as neatly as it explains BioWare.

EA Sports picked up work rather than cuts. FC keeps its investment, Fight Night is in pre-production using the simulation fighting team, and there is a social-first open-world American football project called Project Gridiron. Both new projects are due to be detailed over the next few months.

The ownership change sits behind all of it. A group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, took EA private this summer in a deal worth around $55 billion. Reports at the time suggested studios could be sold or reorganised, and this note is the first large answer to those reports.

One franchise is carrying on outside EA entirely. Amazon’s Mass Effect adaptation for Prime Video is set after the original trilogy and will not feature Commander Shepard, with Daniel Casey writing and executive producing and Doug Jung attached as showrunner. Casting, production start and a release window are all unannounced. A report earlier this year claimed Amazon’s head of global TV, Peter Friedlander, had asked for the scripts to be rewritten for non-gamers, which Casey publicly denied.

I think the Sims decision is the one worth watching over the next year, because it is the only part of this restructure that trades a finished-sounding project for a vaguer one. Evergreen now has to justify two teams’ worth of patience, and The Sims 4 has to stay playable long enough for it to arrive.

EA says affected staff will be supported in looking for other roles inside the company, and that the direction will be discussed at a global town hall in November. Nothing in the note attaches a date to Project Evergreen.