Ex-Dragon Age Producer Says EA Is a 'Hedge Fund With a Video Game Hobby' and the Series Is Probably Dead

Mark Darrah, who spent 23 years at BioWare before leaving in 2021, says he has little faith Dragon Age will ever return — and he lays the blame squarely on EA's corporate priorities and the near-total hollowing out of BioWare itself.

Speaking to FRVR, Darrah said he doesn't know who at BioWare would even pitch a new Dragon Age, given how few people remain after the layoffs that followed The Veilguard's disappointing sales. He suggested that if someone outside BioWare tried to pitch it internally at EA, BioWare staff would likely resist the attempt. He also pointed to EA's broader habit of sitting on dormant IPs and its reliance on annualized sports franchises that consistently outperform one-off titles. On why Veilguard took so long to ship, Darrah was blunt: "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a video game hobby that it wished it didn't spend so much money on. And I think that remains true." He also raised EA's pending leveraged buyout by a consortium that includes Saudi Arabian investment, asking rhetorically whether those investors would even want a Dragon Age game — or BioWare at all.

BioWare is now a one-game studio focused entirely on the next Mass Effect. Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to hit the sales targets EA had set, triggering significant layoffs that left the studio a shadow of its former self. The studio built its reputation across two decades on story-driven RPGs — Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 2, and Knights of the Old Republic among them — but EA's acquisition history doesn't inspire confidence: Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis, and Pandemic all followed a similar arc after being absorbed.

On the remaster front, Darrah said a Dragon Age trilogy remaster could sell extremely well — Origins in particular has aged visually and he believes there's real commercial upside — but he sees it as increasingly unlikely. The core obstacle is technical: almost nobody left at BioWare or anywhere else understands the Aurora Engine the original trilogy ran on, unlike Mass Effect's Unreal-based codebase which made the Legendary Edition far more feasible. Darrah had previously hoped to package the first three games as Champions Editions built around each game's central figures, but that idea appears to have died with the studio's downsizing.