Time flies (like the Javelin suit): There are only 10 days left to play BioWare's ill-fated multiplayer Anthem before the servers are shut down, presumably for good.
We had this end date in our diary. since EA announced it last summer. “After careful consideration, we will cease operating Anthem on January 12, 2026,” the company said. Then this day seemed far away; this is no longer the case.
It's unclear if there will be any “shutdown event.” I'm trying to figure this out.
Since Anthem is an online multiplayer game, once EA shuts down the servers, you won't be able to play it, regardless of whether you own it or not. It's an aspect of modern live-service gaming that frustrates many people: the disappearance of games they bought but can no longer play. This led to movements such as “Stop Ruining Games” and “Stop Killing Games” petitions to governments. in hopes of establishing protections to prevent this from happening.
But if a game doesn't attract a large enough audience to justify the ongoing server costs, which I don't think Anthem did, then what's a company to do – launch it at a loss? Or is he handing over the code to the community to host the servers themselves? I'm sure the last option is not as simple as it seems.
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Still, Anthem's end seems emblematic of the story of BioWare, a company known for its single-player RPGs that was encouraged and perhaps forced to make a huge bet on a multiplayer game that didn't work out. It was as one of the key people involved in the project once told me“dichotomy” is a game that tried to be two things (a BioWare experience and a multiplayer game) but ended up being neither. Oli called Anthem a game “shaken by its own identity crisis” in a Eurogamer review.
There were plans to remake Anthem—ambitious plans for a 2.0 reboot that would revitalize the game. but they were eventually abandoned.
Anthem's 2019 woes piled on Mass Effect: Andromeda2017 setbacks, leaving BioWare in a precarious and stressed position after its relative heyday Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014. Final release Dragon Age: Guardian of the Veil in 2024, after 10 years of inverted development, including several years of multiplayer, nothing has been done to fix this.
Now all eyes are on the elusive fifth Mass Effect game in developmentBioWare's existence may depend on its success. Again, with Sports-focused EA acquisition in Saudi Arabia is nearing completion and there is no telling what might happen or what the new owners might want.
