anthem cancelled – Trekking with Dennis

Bad news, guys: Anthem is gone. After today, you can never play it again.

What do you mean “WTF is Anthem?” You know: that BioWare game from 2019? With the flying “Iron Man” suits? BioWare’s genre-defining epic? The “ten-year experience” that defined a generation? The “Bob Dylan of video games?” Anthem!

Okay, all jokes aside, today – the 12th of January 2026 – is the final day that Anthem’s servers are going to be online. The game has already been removed from digital shops on all platforms in anticipation of this, and when the plug is pulled on those servers later today, that’s it. No more Anthem… ever.

Photograph of Bob Dylan performing in Toronto. — *Anthem* was supposed to be the video game equivalent of Bob Dylan…
*Photo: Jean-Luc, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons*

Let’s not beat around the bush: Anthem was dog shit. It was a decade too late, developed by a studio that had no experience with online multiplayer titles, it suffered from weak world-building, and the entire game was rebuilt from scratch in the eighteen months before it launched because the version(s) shown to the higher-ups at EA were even worse. It relied on a totally fake CGI trailer to generate hype, players felt swindled and let down when they finally got to try the game, and it even seemed, for a hot minute, that Anthem’s failure would condemn BioWare to the ever-growing Electronic Arts graveyard.

So… why should we care that Anthem is finally being put out of its misery?

There are some pretty bad or poorly-received games that I think we *all* have enjoyed over the years. And there are plenty of so-bad-it’s-good titles that can be fun to boot up for a challenge… or just to have a laugh. The weird Home Improvement tie-in game for the SNES, Carmageddon 64, Blue Stinger on the Dreamcast… I’m sure you have your own examples. But the point is this: we can still play those games if we want to.

Screenshot from Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit on the SNES. — There are plenty of less-than-great games that are still around and playable.

Anthem may have sucked, but it shouldn’t be up to EA and BioWare to tell us we can’t play it. That’s the bottom line here, and loathe as we may be to defend a monotonous, boring slog of a game like Anthem… it should still be accessible. Converting the game to be playable offline isn’t beyond EA and BioWare’s capabilities, and while I absolutely concede that keeping dedicated server space online for a dead game is a waste of resources… that doesn’t excuse killing the game entirely and rendering it unplayable.

A lot of players (okay, not *a lot*, because it’s Anthem, but you know what I mean) played Anthem solo. Despite being intended to be a multiplayer experience, it was possible to go through the game on your own, if you wanted to. And games like this have bots all the time – how hard would it have been to tone down some of the more difficult moments, add bots to replace human teammates, and keep the game playable for solo players? Or how hard would it be to turn off the dedicated servers but keep the game playable for local multiplayer, or even for peer-to-peer multiplayer? These things *are* achievable.

Promo screenshot for 2019's Anthem showing a character in a mech suit. — Bad news for *Anthem’*s remaining fan.

Another notorious flop in the live service space is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. That game is also dead, and cost its parent company well over $100 million. But last year, Suicide Squad was updated to give the game an offline mode for solo players. Even when its servers are inevitably shut down, the game will remain playable for the folks who enjoyed it. See how easy that was? Yes, Kill the Justice League isn’t a fun game, and you can see why people who tried it bounced off it. But some people did gel with it and did enjoy it for its gameplay, its story, and so on. The same is true of Anthem. Don’t both sets of players deserve to be able to continue to play the games they enjoy? Games that, lest we forget, *they paid for*.

Anthem was never free-to-play. If you picked it up on launch day, you paid £50/$60 for the privilege. That’s less than seven years ago, and now that money – and any additional money spent at the in-game shop – is just… gone. The product that folks bought is now useless; Anthem discs might as well be coasters or frisbees. That… well, it just isn’t right. Is it?

This is a much more fundamental, philosophical point, but I believe all works of art and media should be preserved. This is human creativity, free expression… Anthem is the culmination of the work of hundreds of people over several years. And like any other work of art, it should be preserved for posterity. If we allow games like Anthem to be deleted, we not only deprive players today of a game they might’ve actually enjoyed or at least wanted to try out, but we also deprive people in the future the chance to see what gaming looked like at that moment in time.

Anthem wasn’t the only big-budget live service title to fail hard in the late 2010s or early 2020s. But in a way, it’s become emblematic of a period in the games industry where corporate publishers went all-in on the live service model. And being able to see what that looked like is important. We shouldn’t allow Electronic Arts and BioWare to get away with scrubbing the internet of Anthem; their shameful failure *should* be on display for all to see. It needs to be seen to be understood, and it needs to be understood because it says a lot about the state of the games industry in the late 2010s. Future media historians are being deprived of the opportunity to study Anthem… and learn what went wrong.

Electronic Arts (EA) is responsible for shutting down Anthem.

I made a similar argument in relation to the original Star Wars film from 1977. Most folks have never seen Star Wars. Sure, they’ve seen A New Hope – the modified version of the film with crappy CGI additions that George Lucas forced into it in the late ’90s. But the original version of Star Wars – the film that started it all – was deliberately being erased and overwritten by Lucasfilm and the Walt Disney Company. That is, until fans took the task of digitally preserving it into their own hands, and created something called “Project 4K77.” You can read more about that by clicking or tapping here.

The point is this: all works of art and pieces of media are important and worth preserving. No film, TV series, painting, novel, or video game deserves to be erased. They simply should not be made inaccessible to folks who want to engage with them, either for entertainment and enjoyment or for academic purposes. And we shouldn’t permit corporations to just arbitrarily decide which works of art and media us plebs are permitted to view. Once something has been created and released, it should remain accessible to everyone. There’s no justification for killing Anthem.

The "roadmap" of content that was never added to Anthem. — *Anthem’*s “roadmap” of content – most of which was never added.

Even if Anthem’s online servers needed to be shut down, there were still a plethora of options for preserving the game itself. And that’s what’s so disappointing about this move: Anthem could have been preserved as a single-player, offline experience, or even with local or peer-to-peer multiplayer. There simply are no technical limitations to prevent this from being possible, which means it was a conscious choice on the part of Electronic Arts to kill the game. It was EA cheaping out, refusing to spend the minuscule amount of money that would’ve been required to preserve the game.

So that task? Now it falls to fans, players, and game preservation groups.

Video games have always been a bit of an odd case when it comes to preservation for one simple reason: hardware. If you don’t own a functional SNES, playing games from Alien 3 to Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel becomes impossible. But that’s where players stepped in: emulation keeps those older games playable long after their original hardware is out of stock, and far beyond the moment where they went out of print. The same could happen for Anthem, though it’ll be a tougher task.

Stock photo of a Super NES (SNES) on a red background. — Games that originally released on older hardware, like the SNES, have been preserved thanks to emulation.

Anthem will need to be modified to be playable offline. I’m not even going to *pretend* that I understand what will need to be done to make that happen; “cracking” the game and modifying parts of its code are just way above my pay grade as a mere critic! But, if past experience has taught us anything, it’s that there are folks out there who are dedicated to video game preservation, and plenty of clever people who know just how to modify even the most complex of code. A playable offline version of Anthem is possible – and it may already be underway.

But it’s unfortunate that a version of this game that folks will be able to play offline wasn’t created officially by EA. And it’s a timely reminder of the importance of the “Stop Killing Games” initiative, which has launched petitions in various countries and territories. A change in the law would be needed, but it isn’t impossible to think that, one day, the kind of thing EA has just done to Anthem will be illegal; that future developers and publishers will be required to preserve their titles and keep a version of them playable indefinitely. For all of the reasons we’ve discussed, I think that’s vitally important.

Promo screenshot/art for 2019's Anthem showing a villain. — It’s the end of the line for *Anthem*… at least, officially.

While I personally don’t give a shit about the utterly dire Anthem, I think its erasure by Electronic Arts is not something to celebrate – nor something to tolerate. And I encourage you to check out “Stop Killing Games” and see how the movement is progressing, whether there are active petitions in your region, and encourage local lawmakers and politicians to get on board. Anthem may not seem like it’s worth preserving, but who are any of us to decide what’s “good enough” for future players and academics to have access to? Even the very worst games you can think of – E.T., Superman 64, Sonic ’06, or Ride to Hell: Retribution – don’t deserve the ignominious fate of being *erased* entirely.

It’s important to preserve as many works of art and media as possible. And at a fundamental level, it’s important not to allow corporations to dictate to us which games we can play, which films we can watch, and so on. That choice should be ours.

Even if that choice is to play a truly awful game like Anthem.

Anthem was released by BioWare and Electronic Arts in 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One consoles. The game is no longer available for purchase. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

After months of speculation, Electronic Arts and BioWare finally confirmed what every gamer and games industry watcher has known for ages: Anthem is dead. Rather than spend even more money on this failure, EA have opted to cancel any remaining plans that they had in the pipeline in order to focus on other projects. And while it may be disappointing to Anthem’s five or six remaining loyal players, it’s unquestionably the right decision.

What was clearly the wrong decision, though, was releasing this mediocre title in the first place. And stepping back even further than Anthem’s troubled 2019 launch, we can argue that it was the wrong decision to push a studio like BioWare – renowned for their single-player role-playing games – to create a “live service” multiplayer action-shooter in the first place.

*Anthem* was developed by Canadian EA subsidiary BioWare.

Game developers and studios have to be allowed to innovate; without trying new things there would never be any progress in video game development, and that wouldn’t be a good thing. But when a studio has a proven track record at making a certain style of game, their publisher or the company who owns that studio pushing them to do something entirely outside that wheelhouse can lead to difficulties and problems.

The developers at BioWare simply did not have the multiplayer experience, the action-shooter experience, or the necessary knowledge of EA’s Frostbite game engine to put together an ambitious title like Anthem. And while senior BioWare managers may have felt, in 2012 when Anthem was first conceived, that they had a new and unique idea, the “live service” concept had been done and done again by the time the game finally stumbled out the door.

Anthem was boring. It was an uninspired shooter whose every in-game system and mechanic had been done before by someone else – and done better. BioWare’s final saving grace when dealing with lacklustre gameplay was the studio’s ability to craft great stories and bring wonderful characters to life – but they failed at that too, and Anthem ended up offering little more than a decently pretty environment. That just isn’t good enough, and players quickly put down this disappointing experience, never to pick it up again.

When Anthem’s “roadmap” of additional content was scrapped in late 2019, that was it. No one who follows the games industry was seriously expecting EA and BioWare to successfully revive the game – and if anyone did, I’ve got a bridge to sell them! All this talk of “Anthem Next” was a cynical attempt by these companies to convince the few remaining Anthem players to stick around and keep spending money in the game with promises of more features and updates. I seriously doubt that EA ever intended to make good on the promise of an overhaul and update of the game; that was nothing more than meaningless empty words designed to exploit those few remaining fans.

After more than a year of living through the coronavirus pandemic I am sick to the back teeth of companies using it as an excuse for whatever the problem of the day is. In their curt blog post announcing the end of Anthem, BioWare attempted to shift the blame onto the pandemic, suggesting that it played a role in this decision. I call bullshit on that. This was a business decision, plain and simple, and it was one that was almost certainly taken a very long time ago.

The reality is that Anthem, like Mass Effect: Andromeda before it, was dead on arrival. The game has been kept on life support for two years, with players fed a steady diet of lies and promises that EA and BioWare had no plans to make good on. Such is the reality of a “release now, fix later” game. So much for being the “Bob Dylan of video games” – a statement so stupid, by the way, that I can scarcely believe anyone at BioWare actually said it.

*Anthem* was supposed to be the video game equivalent of Bob Dylan.
*Photo Credit: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Anthem needs to be a lesson, not just for BioWare and Electronic Arts but for the games industry in general. You can’t release a mediocre game and convince people to stick around in case it gets good later. “Release now, fix later” categorically does not work. The legacy of Anthem needs to be that better games are released in the wake of its failure.

If a game is not in a good enough state, it should be delayed and not forced into a release window to meet some arbitrary deadline. Big companies like Electronic Arts can absorb the costs of prolonging development if it means that the game will eventually launch to critical acclaim and commercial success. By forcing Anthem to be released when it was simply not ready, Electronic Arts snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and pissed away a huge amount of money.

Anthem was never financially viable. No multiplayer game that loses 90% of its playerbase in a matter of weeks can possibly be sustainable, which is another reason why I’m convinced that all this talk of a “renewal” or update to Anthem was never serious on the part of EA and BioWare. The sad thing is that there was potential in Anthem. Had it been a project that was handled differently its flying “Iron Man” suits and brand-new sci-fi world could have gone on to be held up alongside franchises like Mass Effect or Halo. But a series of poor decisions across its development meant that wasn’t possible, and it seems unlikely at this stage that Anthem’s world will ever be revisited.

What this means for Anthem’s remaining players is that it’s over. It’s time to jump ship and not spend another penny on any in-game microtransactions. While BioWare have promised to keep the servers running for now, in reality it’s only a matter of time before they’re shut down and the game is gone forever. There are other, better games out there to play, so if you’re one of those few remaining players, have a look for something else to play instead.

For BioWare this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it potentially frees up a handful of developers to work on the next Dragon Age game, Mass Effect 4, and whatever else may be in the pipeline. On the other hand it confirms what we’ve all known for a while – the studio has released two failures in a row. Electronic Arts, rather like Google, has a reputation for shutting down unsuccessful studios and killing projects that aren’t bringing in enough money. There was already a lot of pressure on BioWare to get their next project right – and that pressure has just increased.

I don’t think we should celebrate the demise of Anthem – but I don’t lament it either. The game was a waste of potential, it damaged the reputation of a studio previously held in high esteem, and serves as yet another example of why this “release now, fix later” trend is such a mistake. Hopefully the lessons of Anthem will be learned so that better games will be made in future. That’s its only shot at a legacy.

Anthem is the copyright of Electronic Arts and BioWare. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Tag: anthem cancelled

Anthem Sucked (But You Should Still Be Allowed To Play It)

So long, Anthem…