When Electronic Arts closed BioWare last month and took the next Mass Effect with it, the coverage was mostly about studios, jobs and intellectual property. Now one of the people who was actually writing the thing has spoken up. Catherynne M. Valente, the award-winning author of Space Opera and the Fairyland books, has revealed on her Substack that she was a contracted outside writer on the unannounced game, and that her work on it has vanished along with the studio.
She is careful about what she can say. She was asked not to share details of the game, and she doesn’t, so anyone hoping for leaked plot points about the Normandy’s next crew will go away disappointed. What she describes instead is what it feels like from the writer’s chair when a game is cancelled: “a nauseating amount of work to simply lose.” Then comes the line that will make every freelancer wince: “I don’t own it, I can’t release it, I can’t do anything with it, it’s effectively gone.”
That is how work-for-hire operates in games. The publisher pays, the publisher owns, and if the publisher decides to switch the lights off, the words stay in a locked drawer, or more likely on a server due for decommissioning. A novelist whose book is cancelled can at least take the manuscript somewhere else. A game writer can’t take her Mass Effect story to another publisher with the asari filed off. It is the same problem we covered when Donato Giancola and John Picacio turned down Asimov’s work-for-hire contracts: whoever owns the rights decides whether the work is ever seen.
It hurts more because Valente is plainly a fan rather than a hired gun. She writes that she once named her phone Liara and had a custom ELCOR licence plate on her car, which may be the single most Mass Effect thing a published author has ever admitted to. (For newcomers: the elcor are the ponderous aliens who announce their emotions before every sentence. With barely concealed despair: we cannot imagine why the plate appealed.) Her post is titled “Yes, Virginia, This Unit Has a Soul”, which crosses the famous 1897 “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” newspaper editorial with the geth Legion’s question, “Does this unit have a soul?”, from Mass Effect 3. Anyone who cried at that scene will recognise the feeling.
Watch on YouTube: The Next Mass Effect – Official Teaser Trailer (2020), which promised that “Mass Effect will continue” and now plays rather like a eulogy.
Fans have not given up. The #SaveMassEffect petition is asking EA to license the series to another studio. A documentary crew happened to be filming inside BioWare when the end came, and Massive Effect: The BioWare Story is heading for festivals next year. But even if some new studio does pick up the Mass Effect licence, it will not be building on Valente’s scripts. A new team would start from scratch, and the story she wrote will remain one of those great unmade works of SF, alongside Jodorowsky’s Dune, which at least got a documentary and a very large book.
Valente, being a novelist, has done the one thing EA can’t stop her doing: she’s written about it. The game may be gone, but the grief is now on the record, and it reads better than most of the press releases about restructuring. Somewhere in a corporate archive, there’s a Mass Effect story by one of SF’s most inventive writers that nobody will ever play. Keelah se’lai.
Source: Catherynne M. Valente, “Yes, Virginia, This Unit Has a Soul” (Substack, 7 November 2026).
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