Why Anthem Got Shut Down
Why Did Anthem Get Canned?
The Most Embarrassing Anthem Glitches
Welcome to MojoPlays! Today, we’re looking at why “Anthem” got canned. What was the final nail in the coffin of this live service game? In 2019, after a troubled few years for BioWare, this once-lauded game developer released a brand-new, highly-publicized IP: “Anthem”. A live service looter-shooter, the market was already saturated by the time “Anthem” came along and it never knew quite who its audience was [1]. People who wanted live service shooters were already playing “Destiny” and weren’t interested in “Anthem”, while BioWare’s core fans – still smarting from “Mass Effect: Andromeda” in 2017 [5] [6] – wanted a return to form for the studio and a much-awaited follow-up to “Dragon Age: Inquisition” [6]. Nobody except EA and a few of BioWare’s developers were truly invested in “Anthem”, which had a notoriously difficult development [4]. One big problem that struck the game was the departure of lead developer Casey Hudson, whose guidance was vital to the success of “Mass Effect” [4]. Then there was EA’s requirement that BioWare continue to use the unwieldy Frostbite engine that had already caused so many technical issues during “Inquisition’s” development [7]. It was clear to everybody – except the executives at EA – that “Anthem” didn’t know what it wanted to be, and in the years since its release it never worked itself out. At launch, the response couldn’t have been more damning. BioWare’s Edmonton studio had fallen from grace, releasing a buggy, empty shell of a game with endless, incoherent lore and uninspired gameplay [1, 3, 4]. All it had going for it was the fun traversal mechanic, but that was nowhere near enough to get people to actually stick with it. Some people’s PS4s were even completely bricked by the game [5] when it came out. Ultimately, nobody thought that “Anthem” was worth the $60 it commanded at launch, and that showed when it didn’t reach any of its sales targets – it even undersold the equally infamous “Andromeda” by half [1]. This disastrous launch, combined with the game’s total lack of unique identity, led to BioWare abandoning its “roadmap” of planned updates [8, 9]. New players weren’t picking up the game, and people who owned it weren’t jumping back in. But BioWare didn’t turn its attention on revamping the content, the developers were instead forced to focus on “Anthem’s” immense technical issues [9] – and this was more than six months after the game’s launch; it took BioWare that long to even try and put the necessary effort into repairing the game because it simply wasn’t finished. It was clear that BioWare wanted to do with “Anthem” what Hello Games did with “No Man’s Sky” [9], only they just weren’t able to turn things around and give “Anthem Next” [10] a redemption arc. But of course that wasn’t the end of the story for “Anthem” – that came in February 2021, just two years after the game’s release, where EA finally decided to shutter “Anthem”, declaring it a failure [10]. Ultimately, “Anthem” could not find a player base. Not only did people not want to spend money on the many microtransactions, which EA relies upon and is the entire reason the company has been pushing live service, but people didn’t want to buy or play the game at all [1]. “Anthem” just couldn’t find a core audience of players who could justify the continued cost of development to EA and BioWare. But what could “Anthem” have done differently, and what lessons should other game developers take from it? Well, maybe if “Anthem” had taken the plunge to a freemium business model early on, it wouldn’t be in this position now. It wanted to be “Destiny” [1, 2] so badly [10], and BioWare should have followed Bungie’s example and made the game free-to-play [17] – then it would have more players, more feedback, and BioWare would have more direction on where its players wanted it to go. Freemium has long been something triple-A publishers don’t get involved in, but with the recent successes of “Call of Duty: Warzone”, “Fortnite”, and, again, “Destiny 2” [2], it’s clear that freemium is extremely profitable [18]. There was no reason why a game like “Anthem” shouldn’t have been free-to-play especially after everybody realized how bad it was [17]. Of course, though Activision is changing, other big publishers, like Square Enix, have learned nothing from “Anthem”. “Marvel’s Avengers” launched in 2020 with an even worse reception than “Anthem” [12] [3], with microtransactions letting you unlock skins to represent the real-world companies who paid to have the Avengers be their mascots – companies like Verizon [14]. Another empty, floundering, live service game, “Marvel’s Avengers” has been a resounding failure [12] even with the weight of the wildly successful MCU behind it and the backing of Disney [3]. But there is a silver lining: EA, though widely regarded as one of the worst publishers in the entire industry [13], does seem to have learned some lessons. Following the failure of “Anthem” and the wild success of Respawn’s “Jedi: Fallen Order” [7], it looks like EA has finally seen that people want single-player games and that single-player games can make money and earn widespread acclaim [11]. These two things have been cited as the reason EA is finally letting BioWare get back to what they’re good at: single-player RPGs [4, 6]. In May, 2021, after years of wishing, players are finally going to have the “Mass Effect” trilogy remastered for 8th and 9th generation consoles and PCs [15]. And both a new “Mass Effect” game [16] [8] and a new “Dragon Age” game have been announced [6] - including the fact that “Dragon Age”, though it was meant to be yet another live-service MMO, is going to be a single-player RPG as well [11]. With BioWare looking like it might get completely shut down for a while, BioWare fans are breathing a sigh of relief that “Anthem’s” development team has been freed up to work on the games they wanted all along. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much money a game gets thrown at it or what the prestige of its developers is: if it’s a bad game, it’s a bad game, and players will see that. Publishers should stop looking for easy money and start looking for high-quality projects that people will want for years to come; unlike “Dragon Age” and “Mass Effect”, “Anthem” is not one of these. And that’s why “Anthem” got canned.
