The mothballing of live service games has become a hot button issue in gaming with the continued momentum of the Stop Killing Games initiative. And on that topic, 2019’s maligned MMO-lite Anthem will shut down early in 2026 after a seven-year run.
You’ll never be able to play it again—no matter how much money you previously spent on Anthem. In a recent interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, BioWare’s Mark Darrah, who was executive producer on Anthem, said it doesn’t have to be this way—but it'd be challenging to reconcile with current multiplayer game design.
"I always knew it was going to go away eventually," Darrah said of Anthem—a pretty mind-boggling thing to hear about a multi-million dollar project that took years of work from dozens of industry veterans. However we might feel as players, there must be a special kind of pain for a developer to see their own work erased like a sand castle at high tide.
“We don’t let chemical companies just flush their toxic waste into the nearest stream. [But] there are consequences to us not letting them do it," said Darrah. “It costs them money to not do that. But we’ve decided correctly as a society that that’s a cost we’re willing to make them pay.”
Darrah’s point: everything comes with a cost. "Anthem could have been built in a way where this wouldn’t have been necessary," he argued.
He cited Destiny’s peer-to-peer hosting system, implying it theoretically could allow for the game to live on after its developer, Bungie, cut off support. Though this kind of infrastructure is apparently quite expensive—overbudget for BioWare, per Darrah. And it comes with its own host of issues.
"But we could have done something," he mused. "It would have been an uglier game, probably would have had more latency issues. It would have been a worse experience second-to-second in order to get something that basically wouldn’t need to ever be sunset."
These sorts of compromises don't sound so bad to me, when the alternative is losing a game I've invested time, money, and effort into, maybe over the course of years. Ubisoft removed (pilfered?) its 2014 racing MMO-lite The Crew from my Steam library in March of 2024, perhaps never to be played again.
I put money into that game. I genuinely enjoyed my drives from New York to LA—and even getting stuck in the Grand Canyon for about half an hour on the way every now and then. But now it’s gone! Maybe given a couple of compromises, it didn't have to be.
"Is that the world we want?" Darrah asked. "I think maybe it is—that we want to be in a world where we’re willing to sacrifice some fidelity… sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don’t just vanish one day."
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