On January 12th Anthem goes offline and unplayable, becoming more of a swan song after half a decade of being of interest to few and maligned by many.
The mech suit-oriented action game set in an undeniably pretty science fiction setting turned out to be BioWare’s greatest failure, one many people forgot about as soon as it released.
TL;DR
Anthem goes offline January 12 — why it failed, what went wrong, and what it means for BioWare
After years of neglect and unrealised promises, Anthem is shutting down its servers on January 12, becoming completely unplayable and effectively erased as an online-only game.
What’s happening to Anthem
- Shutdown date: January 12.
- Result: Servers go offline → the game becomes fully unplayable, even for owners.
- Reason: Online-only design with no offline fallback.
Why Anthem failed
- Released in 2019 into a crowded live-service market dominated by Destiny 2 and Warframe.
- Clashed with BioWare’s RPG-focused identity.
- Lacked compelling endgame, meaningful updates, and long-term vision.
Post-launch support that never delivered
- Planned large updates called Cataclysms were quickly scaled down.
- The promised full overhaul Anthem Next was cancelled by EA.
- Development resources were shifted elsewhere by early 2020s.
Online-only = permanent death
- Even single-player content becomes inaccessible once servers shut down.
- Purchased copies and premium currency become meaningless.
- This case fuels movements like StopKillingGames.
Anthem as a warning sign for BioWare
- Followed a string of troubled releases: Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2, Andromeda, The Veilguard.
- Marked a clear shift away from BioWare’s former “industry leader” reputation.
- Often seen as the moment cracks became impossible to ignore.
What this means going forward
- BioWare still needs a major win.
- Mass Effect Legendary Edition showed the studio can still deliver quality.
- The next Mass Effect is critical for restoring long-term trust.
Important tips: Anthem’s shutdown is a reminder that online-only games can disappear entirely — ownership doesn’t guarantee preservation, and live-service promises mean nothing once servers go dark.
Promises of extensive support never materialized fully, the revamp was nipped in the bud, and all news about it were likely to be met with surprise that the game was still up.
Well, no longer. In a few days the game will no longer be up due to January 12th server shutdown, the true cause of death of every online-only entity.
Anthem’s troubles
Anthem struggled from the get-go, announced in 2017, at the time the gaming industry was taking its first plunge into the live service games-oriented mentality, but it came from a studio from which nothing of this sort was expected.
Bioware at the time had been known for its engaging, dramatically satisfying role-playing games, a reputation only somewhat marred by the controversial original ending for Mass Effect 3 and the weird direction chosen for the otherwise lovely Dragon Age II. A open world, multiplayer-friendly third-person shooter/action RPG was a bewildering direction to take, and the game failed to earn players’ interest after its release in 2019. Destiny 2 and Warframe were having their time in the spotlight at the time, delivering on the solo and co-op science fiction with tried and tested skill and without the baggage carried by Anthem.
Post-launch support: Unrealised ideas
There were plans for post-launch content drops, called “Cataclysms”, with the first bit releasing in August 2019. Even that idea fizzled out, becoming smaller seasonal updates by October of that year.
BioWare had big plans for a comprehensive revamp, dubbed Anthem Next… and it was cancelled as well, by publisher EA’s decree. Production resources got shifted towards other licenses in BioWare’s portfolio, leaving Anthem in the dirt by the early 2020s.
Anthem was clearly cursed from the beginning, and its online-only nature also means that the servers going offline effectively kills the game entirely, whether you have it in your library or not. It doesn’t matter the game has a singleplayer mode, or that dedicated players could acquire premium currency.
It will be fully unplayable.
Cases like this are a reason initiatives like StopKillingGames gained the traction they have, hoping to preventing games from becoming completely defunct after servers die.
Bioware’s seeming decline: A(nthem) canary in the coal mine
Anthem’s development and release woes were something of a signal that BioWare wasn’t the “bangers only” studio it had been in the late 90s and into the 2010s.
The divisive ending to ME3 had to get an extended edition to fix its flat resolution, Dragon Age 2 took years of bad reputation before it started to become appreciated as a genuinely great story hurt by extraordinarily short development.
Mass Effect Andromeda launched in the wake of early build weirdness and never recovered, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard general reputation seems to have averaged out to be “it’s okay” at best even among the moderate parts of the audience.
BioWare’s future
Who knows what the expected new Mass Effect is going to be like, but BioWare desperately needs a win. The upside is that the Mass Effect Legendary Edition was a pretty solid and worthwhile return to the series. It does let some hope linger.
One way or another, while all the other Bioware games will remain playable (for fun, nostalgia, or curiosity) until nobody is around to let us download them, Anthem’s going dark on January 12th, effectively removing the game from existence unless techwizards in the gaming community make some miraculous workaround.