Earlier this month, it was announced thatBioWarewould be shuttingAnthem’sservers down for goodon July 01, 2025. It’s not necessarily news that comes out of nowhere.
The multiplayer RPG shooter has been untouched for many years now – the game launched in 2019 to awful reviews and was maligned by fans, its development was marred by mismanagement and a lack of consistent vision, and after the announcement of a reboot and the cancellation of said reboot, Anthem was left to die from 2021 onwards.
It may surprise you that Anthem’s servers haven’talreadybeen shut down. It certainly surprised me!
Anthem was, by all accounts, not a good game. It was a product of trend-chasing, a looter shooter trying to hop on a bandwagon that had already left it in the dust, and it showcased none of the things that BioWare was, at the time, renowned for. It has its defenders –our own Andrew King, for one– but it’s pretty much a ‘dead game’, and has been for some time now.
Anthem Will Disappear Forever When The Servers Are Shut Down
It’s hard to say how many people arestillplaying the ill-fated title, since it was never released on Steam, which is the only platform with public data on player counts. That said, Nicole Carpenterwrote for Aftermath, “For years now, players in private Facebook groups and Discord servers have been gathering to look for groups on all platforms. Sure, you can’t just jump into a game and queue up with three other people, but one veteran player I spoke to, Jon, said he can usually find at least one or more people in the game’s free roam modes.”
That’s not a lot of players, but whether or not people are regularly playing Anthem or whether it’s even a good game doesn’t detract from the fact that it shouldn’t be erased from existence completely. That is, of course, what shutting down the servers will do for an online game like this. Unless EA decides to allow players to continue hosting private servers, or perhaps create an offline single-player mode, Anthem will disappear. This is very unlikely – nobody has worked on the title in years, and there’s no financial incentive to devote resources to it at this point.
This is, however, what fans have been calling for.Over 600 people have signed a petitionfor EA to “release [Anthem’s] server files, or dedicated server binaries, as an optional DLC”, so that players can continue maintaining the game. While I admire the chutzpah of players standing up for a game they love, the petition is unlikely to have any impact.
Anthem’s Preservation Is A Matter Of Gaming History
I do agree with these people, though, that companies shouldn’t be able to yank back things you’ve paid for. If you pay for a product, you should be able to keep it. With video games, this is often not the case. Games with online servers can be pulled completely, and there are even clauses in many games that sayif a publisher takes any of its games offline, you have to uninstall the product and destroy all your copies, never mind that you paid to own it.
It’s this reality that has people organising initiatives to enable games preservation – theStop Killing Games movement, in particular, has been in the news lately because itcrossed the one million signature threshold. If those million signatures are found to be valid, the petition will reach the floor of the European Parliament. It’s even gotten the backing ofone of the vice presidents of the European Parliament.
Players should be allowed to keep the games that they pay for, but more than that, games shouldn’t be erased from existence. BioWare is one of the most important studios in video game history, and Anthem disappearing into the void means we are losing part of that history. It’s more than a consumer rights issue, as important as that is – it’s a cultural issue.
