Mass Effect Legendary Edition Passes $100 Post-BioWare Closure

BioWare's closure has pushed the price of Mass Effect Legendary Edition into territory few people saw coming, and if you own a boxed copy, it's now worth far more than what you paid. The PlayStation 4 version is the one getting the most attention, and the numbers are hard to ignore.

This didn't happen overnight. Mass Effect Legendary Edition has been climbing for a while, but the studio's shutdown has sped things up. Not long ago you could find a copy for $15 to $20. Now it's well north of $100. This could be a hot stretch: the BioWare news fades, attention moves on, and prices drift back down.

Even so, the price climb started well before any of the recent talk, and that's worth keeping in mind.

On eBay, a pre-owned PlayStation 4 copy is listed at $120. New copies are also listed at $130, and they're moving. One auction has 12 bids and is already at $70, with five days left before it closes. Those numbers matter because they aren't asking prices that sit untouched. Buyers are paying them.

For a game that went for a fraction of that a short time ago, Mass Effect Legendary Edition has turned into something people are willing to bid on in earnest, and anyone holding physical copies is finding takers. Plenty of people bought in at the $60 launch price, and some bought it twice.

The second and third games are in there as well, along with every piece of DLC, and the whole set shows BioWare at its peak. Even so, $120 for a used disc is a lot. If you've been meaning to buy Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the window to get it at a reasonable price is closing. If you already own a copy, you're holding something that keeps gaining value.

Either way, Mass Effect Legendary Edition reminds us that discs tied to a closed studio don't stay cheap. Expect what's happening to Mass Effect Legendary Edition to spread across many titles over the next year, and some of the picks will make no sense. Wet on PlayStation 3 is selling for $100, and nobody can explain why.

The bigger jump will probably come once the physical market actually shuts down.

If Sony goes through with that, which seems likely, you'll see the same kind of surge we're seeing in PlayStation 3 games right now. 3D Dot Game Heroes is around $120, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is close to $200, and the price on Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is rough to look at.

Not every game will climb that high, but many will. The special edition of Muramasa: The Demon Blade is out of stock everywhere, so don't expect it to be cheap. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim could also get expensive in a couple of years. These jumps usually come down to how many copies are out there. Games with a small number in circulation tend to rise.

That could explain Mass Effect Legendary Edition, since it may have had a bigger digital split and a short print run, though it's hard to say how they handled it. Some of the next big movers will catch you off guard. The Order: 1886 or inFAMOUS Second Son could end up expensive one day, and nobody would see it coming.

Look at the PlayStation 3 lineup, and you'll notice that many of the pricey ones are licensed games and early movie tie-ins. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 4 is already one of them. Titles tied to news stories, like the studio's closure, also stick in people's memories, and those tend to climb too.

Alan Wake Remastered on PlayStation 5 is an $80 game right now.

That's probably because Alan Wake is a notable franchise, and few copies are in circulation. Circulation and limited print runs matter most. Even incomplete games go up, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PlayStation 5 is an example, since only a small number of copies exist.

If you care about this sort of thing, now is the time to consider picking up physical copies of Black Myth: Wukong, and of Phantom Blade Zero once it arrives. With so much of the market leaning digital, neither is expected to get a long print run or many copies in circulation. Alan Wake 2 fits the same description.

Those are the games collectors tend to regret waiting for. If Black Myth: Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero end up with thin print runs, people will hunt for the physical copies on eBay later, and the asking prices will show it. The canceled Mass Effect Universe trailer has also leaked online.

It looks cool, sure. But it reads more like a CG piece, though the mood and concept both work. What stands out more is the timing. They announced the continuation of Mass Effect about five years ago, closer to six, back in the lockdown era when the years blurred together.

Now that the studio has closed, it has said early development was wrapping up. That's the part that stings. You were told the next game was coming along; N7 Day came and went each year with the same message, and it's hard not to see it as a way to build excitement and keep faith in the studio.

This is why so many teasers and CG trailers feel pointless.

It's hard to get excited about a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic project when a Mass Effect game was announced five or six years ago and the studio is now gone. Some games do make it to the finish line, like Black Myth: Wukong, and Phantom Blade Zero is about to come out.

Then you get cases like Mass Effect Universe or the KOTOR remake, where a game is revealed five, six, or seven years before it has any chance of releasing. Each time, the line is that the team has to grow, and apparently only a small group was working on this one. Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived four years after its teaser, then bombed, and no real work got done on the project after that.

It's tough to know how anyone is supposed to get excited about announced games. Take the God of War Greek saga remake, which was revealed even though Santa Monica has another God of War game on the way. There was no need to show it that early, and nobody knows when you'll actually get to play it. Revealing games that far ahead is questionable.

The usual defenses don't hold up either. You hear people say they need something to get excited about, or that the game was going to leak anyway. In the Mass Effect Universe, a leak makes little difference. If you're going to unveil something and then say six years later that it's still in early development, that doesn't fly.

For now, Mass Effect Legendary Edition is the one to watch.

It's pushing $100 on eBay, and if you hold a copy, you should hold on tight. Over the next year and into 2028, the value looks set to keep rising. It wouldn't surprise me if Mass Effect Legendary Edition goes over $200 by the time physical printing wraps up, since the trilogy will always be iconic and plenty of people will want it on their shelf.

What makes it worse is how little came of it. In 2020, a new Mass Effect game was confirmed to be in development, and six years later, the result is a studio closing its doors. There isn't much to show for that time, which is why Mass Effect Legendary Edition now carries so much weight for fans.