EA to Decide Fate of Anthem (Update: Development Has Ceased)

Jesus Christ I feel so sorry for all the people who bought Anthem and believe in Anthem 2.0
Year ago I wrote that Anthem 2.0 will never happen.

Considering EA's track record and the fact that Anthem didn't reach sales expectations and problems with matchmaking due to low player count, it's safe to say they will cancel it, plus Anthem is a last gen game, they will need to develop a proper next gen version alongside overhauling the game.

I can safely say I got nothing on this one. From an executive standpoint, EA has canceled projects at far better shape with more work done to them than this. I doubt this will even be a "blip" in their budget expenditures.

Anthem could, theoretically, make a comeback. It has a huge user base. Over time and with some ludicrous discounts, not to mention the buzz that made people actually want to check it out, to see if it was indeed as bad as people said it was, Anthem could make a comeback. Literally everyone picked it for like $5. Give it a free PS5/XSEX update, with the redesign and maybe sell the "new content" for $30 and you could flip it. But the redesign would have to be stellar. The PS5/XSEX update already exists, it's called PC settings high, you just do some optimization for the hardware, which EA should already have Frostbite tools for and just compile it.

The big issue is can the MTX money from Anthem make a good RoI for the investment. And I don't think it's there.

Goodbye Anthem... no one will miss you.

IMHO, the most likely outcome is cutting the project entirely. It's too ambitious, and thus too costly. People might disagree with me, but the moment they even thought about overhauling it (as a less than stellar success to begin with) was the moment the final outcome was decided, it's just taking time to sink in.

What *should've* been done is skip the overhaul, and push extra content. It requires much less than redesigning the wheel, extends the lifetime, and, when considering a game as sorely lacking in content as this, can actually revive it enough that the cashflow can convince the executives to spend more money on the project to redesign it.

Trying to overhaul instead of extend would've been bad enough, but BioWare went for the double stupid of trying to do both, when not really having the resources to do either. So, where I would usually point the finger at EA and ride the EA hatetrain, this is a situation caused by BioWare, perpetuated by BioWare, and exacerbated by BioWare. EA killing it at this point would be be a mercy killing before it sinks the whole ship that is already paling out water for all it's worth.

"Trial Balloon" is the term you're looking for. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case.

EDIT: I figured I'd take time to expound my own thoughts on this. I think everyone who saw the Jason Schreier Bloomberg article was probably taken aback that EA was still in the process of deciding whether or not it was worth fully developing the game. Even more so after comments were made by one of EA's managers (I can't remember her name, but she made comments about wanting to see the success of Anthem). With this new revelation, I'm leaning more towards "no" that the project will get greenlit. EA's likely sunk a lot of money into the game already, along with the huge marketing costs, and given the likely small amount of concurrent players (plus a highly mired game), it would make sense for them to pull the plug.

What's interesting to me is that EA hasn't pulled the plug on the game yet. They killed continual content updates for Andromeda only 6 months after it launched, and the decision seemed to be so abrupt, that even members of the multiplayer crew (like Fernando Melo) were taken aback. I know people will bring up SW:Battlefront 2 and BFV having their content updates ceased as justification for how quickly EA will put down support for a game, but you have to remember that (1) these games received two years worth of support, and (2) they're part of franchises that have multiple titles released over a few years (more so for Battlefield). EA likely expects another Battlefield game come next year, and there may even be plans for another Battlefront game down the line. You can still make a good case of EA stamping out support for titles, as there was a roadmap of more content planned for BFV.

I think EA is likely balancing the potential install base of Gamepass & the likelihood of new/returning players, versus how much money it would take to essentially make another Anthem (though with a slightly smaller budget). Last September, Microsoft came out and said that they had roughly 15M Gamepass subscribers, and that's likely increased since then. Even if Anthem were to get 3% of that population to play on a consistent basis, you're still looking at 450k players; which are generally decent numbers. These same subscribers may also be more willing to give the game a try since - from a psychological standpoint - they're not technically paying for it.

In my mind, I still think it would be best at this point to see the project discontinued. Mainly because games like these live and die by the amount of content they offer. There's a huge deficit of content in Anthem. Even if the game is overhauled, people are going to come in with expectations that there's a wealth of things to do because (1) they would expect BioWare to know that this area was the games biggest complaint, and (2) the game will have had more than two years of dev time to fix this deficit. You need a fully-staffed studio (200+ strong) to keep a strong, and consistent playerbase going. I don't see the Austin studio getting that many new, and permanent, developers working on the project.

Please don’t be killed, Anthem.

While the verdict, internally, is already out, the programmers won't know until Monday. In the meantime, the execs underlings will spend the weekend forming a plan of how they go forward, either by shifting some members to other projects, or letting them go, in the case of cancelation, or by seeing where the project needs more work and assigning, or hiring, new people.

And no, I may know, more or less, how the inner workings go, but I don't know the verdict either. I've got nothing on this.

A looter shooter with just 30 people to support it’s as good as dead. If they go forward, they’ll need a few times more than that to provide anything adequate. 

That's likely why this evaluation is occurring: To decide if they'll allocate more developmental bandwidth to the studio. If the revival of the project gets greenlit, I'm curious what road EA will take in shoring up developers to work on the game. The way I see, the options in front of them are:

Option A: Pulls developers from Austin (working on SW:TOR) off of that game - likely most of them - to work on developing the game. This would be trading development of one game for another, and that might not be what EA wants; especially since I'm sure SW:TOR still makes some money.

Option B: Pull developers from one of EA's other studios. EA could allot one or more of its smaller studios to assist with developing and/or maintaining the game. I believe studios like the recently purchased Codemasters, as well as EA Motive and Criterion would likely be their picks; though not all.

Option C: This one is a bit of Option A mixed in, but EA would essentially contract new, albeit temporary employees, to help with the games development. From then on, the Austin studio would be solely devoted to maintaining it.

Option D: EA hires all new staff entirely, likely one-hundred or more strong in the long term.

As was mentioned before by other users here, you NEED to have a large development staff on hand if you want to keep content up at a regular pace. Personally, I think something akin to Destiny is unrealistic because Bungie is in a very unique situation where they're not only a studio that is one of the largest, but also independent. Most other studios (working on looter shooter titles) won't be able to drop content to the same degree that Bungie does, but I think as long as the content is solid and comes in predictable intervals, that'll likely be fine for a majority of players. Players leaving to play other games is an inevitability, even with Destiny. The question is, was your content offerings good enough to entice people to want more and come back.

If BioWare is allowed to revamp Anthem, they need to keep accessibility, player loot intentionality, and replayability in mind.