Esteemed RPG studio BioWare released its sci-fi game Anthem on this day, February 22, in 2019, meaning the game is now two years old. Billed as an exciting new franchise from the developer of classic Star Wars games and the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, Anthem wasn’t a hit like BioWare’s other franchises were, either critically or commercially. But the game might not be dead and buried just yet.
Following the game’s release in 2019, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said in no uncertain terms: “The launch of Anthem did not meet our expectations.” EA was predicting the game to sell between 5-6 million units by the end of March 2019, but it didn’t reach that.
While the game might not have met EA’s lofty sales expectations right out of the gate, the game achieved the second best first-month sales for any BioWare game in history in the United States, only behind Mass Effect 3.
Despite the slower-than-expected start for Anthem, EA announced that BioWare would not abandon the game but instead focus its efforts on improving and expanding upon it. New IP is the lifeblood of EA, and the company is apparently interested in helping Anthem to find a successful future.
“We believe in the team at BioWare, and we also believe in what they set out to achieve with this game–building a new IP and melding genres to reach a new audience,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2019.
BioWare has supported Anthem since launch with new content, features, and functionality. The latest we heard was that management at EA were planning to make a call about whether or not the campaign to reboot Anthem after its disappointing launch was still worth the effort or if BioWare’s developers would shift their time and attention to other projects.
Bloomberg reported that EA executives planned to review the latest version of Anthem earlier in February and make a call, but the decision might have been delayed due in part to the wild weather in Texas, which is the site of BioWare Austin.
For now, the future of Anthem is uncertain and seemingly undecided. We’ll report back with any notable updates that come through in the time ahead.
In GameSpot’s Anthem review, Kallie Plagge wrote, “Anthem has good ideas, but it struggles significantly with the execution. It’s a co-op game that works best with no one talking; it buries genuinely interesting character moments and puts its most incomprehensible story bits at the forefront; its combat is exciting until you get to the boss fights and find your wings have been clipped. Even the simple, exhilarating act of flying is frequently interrupted by the limitations of your javelin, and you never quite shake that feeling of disappointment–of knowing, throughout the good parts of Anthem, that you’ll inevitably come crashing back down.”
In addition to the effort to bring Anthem back from the brink, if that is indeed going to happen, the studio is launching Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in May. The game bundles together the original Mass Effect trilogy with various updates and enhancements.
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