Mass Effect's Longshot #SaveMassEffect Campaign Actually Has a Chance

There's historical precedence for this sort of thing

On Oct. 21, EA officially announced the closure of legendary RPG maker BioWare after 30 years of operation. With the shutdown, the next Mass Effect game is now trapped in EA IP purgatory. But over the past week, devoted fans of the series have rallied around a social media campaign to save the game, fittingly called #SaveMassEffect. And even though it's one hell of a longshot, there's historical precedent for success here.

Mass Effect has had a tumultuous decade. In the early 2010s, the original trilogy earned its place as one of the best RPG space operas of all time, thanks to its well-realized sci-fi world, fascinating cast of characters, and emphasis on player choice. Its 2017 spinoff, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was more divisive; players loved the action, but didn’t click with the narrative or characters like they did with the original game. EA put Mass Effect on ice soon after.

In 2020, BioWare revealed a new Mass Effect game was in the works, and teased it intermittently over the following years. Some early promotional materials suggested it would serve as connective tissue between Andromeda and the original trilogy. Shortly after BioWare’s closure, a trailer for the next Mass Effect project, called Mass Effect: Universe, leaked online, teasing a radical departure for the series. Set 600 years after the events of the main trilogy, several people familiar with production likened it to “James Bond meets John Wick in space.” For fans of the series, seeing Mass Effect: Universe footage make the rounds only made its cancellation sting even more.

This entire situation smacks of another sci-fi masterpiece that was canceled before its time yet returned off the back of passionate fan outcry: The Expanse. Based on James S.A. Corey’s series of novels, The Expanse is set in the near future, where humanity has colonized the solar system. Fans flocked to its grounded approach to space opera, which focused more on roiling political tensions between interplanetary nation-states rather than fantastical sci-fi concepts and creatures that bordered on fantasy (cough: Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune).

In 2018, SyFy canceled its TV adaptation of The Expanse after three seasons. Fans immediately rallied around a digital awareness campaign, #SaveTheExpanse. IRL astronauts peppered social media with calls for its return. So did George R.R. Martin. But a few months later, Amazon picked up the show (founder Jeff Bezos, who announced its revival personally, was reportedly a fan), where it ran for three more seasons on Prime Video. Telltale Games released a video game prequel in 2023, and Owlcat Games is currently working on the spinoff The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a promising third-person action RPG due out next year.

Over the weekend, the #SaveMassEffect campaign saw a similar tidal wave of interest. Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, who voice the female and male versions of protagonist Commander Shepherd, urged players to sign the petition. As did Owlcat Games, which noted how The Expanse was saved by fans years ago. There are even billboards in Times Square about it, Kotaku reported. As of this writing, the #SaveMassEffect petition has been signed by more than 200,000 people.

By the end of its run, the #SaveTheExpanse campaign ultimately accrued 138,420 signatures.

Of course, there are some notable differences between these two endeavors. Mass Effect is a video game. The Expanse is a TV show. Completely different worlds.

But you can nevertheless run the burn rate of what it would cost to see Mass Effect: Universe over the finish line. According to figures from Glassdoor, the average game developer salary in Edmonton, Alberta, where BioWare was based, is roughly $70,000 CAD (or $49,857 USD). Bloomberg reported that BioWare employed roughly 50 people at the time of its shutdown. Additional reports (albeit unconfirmed) suggested BioWare was targeting a 2028 release for Mass Effect: Universe, meaning two more years of active development.

All told, that comes out to roughly $5,000,000 of overhead — or about the cost of producing one episode of The Expanse during the SyFy days, according to one of its actors. (Amazon has never publicly revealed how much it cost to produce seasons 4 through 6 of The Expanse, but as any fan will tell you, there was an unmistakable uptick in production value between the SyFy seasons and the Prime Video ones.)

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Of course, this napkin math leaves out one potentially enormous expense that could halt this entire thing in its tracks. As the original #SaveTheExpanse petition noted, Amazon already had U.S. streaming rights for The Expanse when it picked up the show. The rights for Mass Effect: Universe remain squarely in EA’s court. If EA doesn’t want to license or sell them, there’s not much anyone can do about that.

But on the other hand, it’s not like the Mass Effect IP is entirely immune to licensing: a show based on Mass Effect is still expected to move ahead despite BioWare’s closure. The company producing it? Amazon.