What a turning point it was.
Time flies (like a Javelin suit): there are only 10 days left to play BioWare’s ill-fated multiplayer game Anthem before the servers are switched off, presumably forever.
We’ve had this end-date in the diary since EA announced it last summer. “After careful consideration, we will be sunsetting Anthem on January 12, 2026,” the company said. That day seemed far away then; now, it does not.
It’s not yet clear whether there’ll be a ‘switching off event’ of any kind. I’m trying to find out.
Because Anthem is an online multiplayer game, once EA switches the servers off, you won’t be able to play it, regardless of if you own it or not. This is an aspect of modern live service gaming many people are frustrated by – this disappearance of games they bought but can no longer play. It’s led to movements like Stop Destroying Games and Stop Killing Games, which are petitioning governments in the hope of putting protections in place to stop this happening.
But if a game is not attracting a large enough audience to justify the expenditure of ongoing server costs, which I don’t think Anthem was, then what’s a company to do – run it at a loss? Or does it release the code to the community to host servers themselves? I’m sure the latter option is not as straightforward as it sounds.
Regardless, Anthem’s end seems symbolic in the story of BioWare – a company famed for single-player role-playing experiences that was encouraged and perhaps pressured 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, a “dichotomy” – 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 apart by its own identity crisis” in Eurogamer’s review.
There were plans to overhaul Anthem – ambitious plans for a 2.0 reboot that would revitalise the experience, but these were eventually abandoned.
Anthem’s misfortunes in 2019 piled onto Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s misfortunes from 2017, leaving BioWare in a precarious and pressurised position after the relative high-point of Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014. The eventual release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024, after 10 years of topsy turvy development – which included a few years as a multiplayer game – did nothing to remedy this.
All eyes now turn to the elusive in-development fifth Mass Effect game, the success of which BioWare’s existence may hinge upon. Then again, with EA’s sports-focused Saudi Arabian acquisition drawing nearer to completion, there’s no telling what may happen and what the new owners may want.
