EA is pulling the plug on Anthem’s servers in 2026
EA has announced that they are sunsetting Anthem, shutting down the game’s servers on 12th January 2026, after which the online-only title will no longer be playable.
In preparation of this, Anthem and premium currency have all been removed from sale.
This comes “After careful consideration” and gives roughly half a year’s notice of the shutdown. The BioWare Team sign off by saying “We deeply appreciate your dedication, passion and support over the years and we’d like to thank you for that.”
Honestly, I’m surprised that EA kept the servers running this long, given how Anthem was one of the most ignominious flops of the past decade.
After a troubled development, Anthem launched on 22nd February 2019 to a generally poor reaction, struggling with performance, bugs, and generally failing to excite in the same way that rivals like Destiny 2 and The Division were managing at the time. The insider tales of the game’s troubled conception at BioWare emerged immediately, the company retreating into its shell after announcing that the Act 1 roadmap had been seriously delayed.
As the continued development of the game was handed over to BioWare Austin, it took half a years before the game’s first event, Cataclysm, was added, followed by smaller seasonal in-game events. It was clear that something dramatic was needed to revive the game’s fortunes and the hope was that Anthem NEXT could be that, those plans shattered by the slower pace of development through the pandemic in 2020, and EA eventually pulled the plug in 2021 around the game’s second anniversary.
That effectively consigned Anthem to the history books, and it’s hard to believe that many people have been playing at all over the past five years. I’d have totally believed you if you told me that servers were already shut down in 2022 or ’23.
The silver lining is that, if you do want to play a game with some pretty great Iron Man style flying, you’ve still got the rest of this year to do so.
Source: EA
