The Mass Effect faithful are absolutely cooking, and honestly, it is about time somebody lit a fire under Electronic Arts. A petition begging the publisher not to bury the franchise forever just blew past 200,000 signatures in less than a week, which is the kind of pace that makes corporate PR teams suddenly remember they have a comments section. But is this actually going to change anything, or are we all just screaming into the void while refreshing a Change.org page?
Shepard Deserves Better Than This
Look, I have a dog in this fight. Mass Effect 2 is the reason I still get misty-eyed when I hear a synthesizer, and the Citadel DLC is the closest video games have ever come to throwing a party that actually feels like a party. So when I say the shutdown of BioWare and the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, reportedly titled Mass Effect: Universe, stings, I mean it stings the way a bad ending to a trilogy stings, which is to say, deeply and for years.
The petition was started Oct. 21, the same day EA announced the closure, by a Change.org user listed as Joe Smith from Denver, who wrote that the series holds a special place in the hearts of millions and that EA’s ambiguous development plans threaten to leave the whole thing at a standstill. Man, if I had a nickel for every time a publisher left something beloved at a standstill, I would have enough nickels to buy EA and personally greenlight the Normandy reunion tour.
The Disc Petition Still Owns the Bigger Shelf
Now, the comparison that nobody asked for but everybody is making is with Don’t Kill the Disc, the petition that popped off July 1 when Sony announced it would stop making discs for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. That one was started by PNP Games, a retailer with three stores in Winnipeg, and it hit 250,000 signatures in a little over a week. By mid-July, it had blown past 320,000.
Here is the twist: The Mass Effect drive actually did outpace it, at least out of the gate. It is not a competition, and yet the gaming community has decided it absolutely is, which is the most gaming community thing imaginable. Somewhere a guy with a physical copy of Mass Effect 3 for the Xbox 360 is feeling very smug, and he cannot explain why.
The Timeline, Checked Twice
Let’s do some actual math here, because somebody has to. The Mass Effect petition launched on a Wednesday, cleared 200,000 signatures within five days and was past 250,000 by day six. The disc petition needed a little over a week to reach that same quarter-million mark. Mass Effect wins the sprint.
The disc folks still own the marathon, though. Don’t Kill the Disc pushed past 350,000 by early August as growth slowed down, and it has since climbed north of 385,000. That is not a dunk. That is two separate groups of people being mad about two separate things, and one of them just happened to have a nearly four-month head start on the outrage cycle. Numbers like that have a way of sticking with you, which is also why I still remember the exact parking spot where I got dumped in 2011 but could not tell you the plot of “Avatar.”
Commander Shepard Is Just Built Different
Mass Effect: Universe was reportedly going to be a smaller-scale spy thriller set a few hundred years after Mass Effect 3, one that would have let players carry their trilogy choices forward and honor Shepard’s legacy. An internal trailer leaked the day after the cancellation, and it looked genuinely good, which is the cruelest possible outcome. We saw a new protagonist, a hulking krogan, Liara showing up near the end and a bar fight that probably would have been the best bar fight in gaming since the one in “The World’s End.”
The fact that EA pulled the plug on more than 30 years of studio history to cut costs (and, according to Bloomberg, to make room for Star Wars Battlefront 3) is the kind of decision that makes you want to write a strongly worded letter and then realize the letter goes to a company that also publishes sports games annually with minimal changes. Former franchise technical director Romain Toutain said on a Twitch stream that EA never actually sells anything and just shuts things down and sits on its licenses, which is the most depressing sentence I have read all week.
We Are All Joe Smith Now
The petition is still climbing, and honestly, same. I have signed it. I have also signed the disc one because I contain multitudes and also because my shelf is a museum of plastic that I refuse to apologize for. The real question is whether EA looks at a quarter-million angry fans and sees a market or sees a headache.
History suggests headache, but history also suggested Mass Effect: Andromeda would be fine, and we all know how that turned out. So I am choosing to believe, just a little, that this thing keeps climbing and that one day a very tired executive opens a spreadsheet, sighs, and writes the word Normandy in the budget column. Until then, I will be here refreshing the page and replaying the Citadel DLC for the 47th time.
Don't stop here
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