EA Reportedly To Decide Anthem's Fate This Week

Anthem, Bioware’s Destiny clone that failed to impress anyone but entomologists (because of all the bugs — get it?), has been in a bit of purgatory for the past few months. While Bioware promised to try and salvage the game with a No Man’s Sky-style revamp, at present, they only have a skeleton crew of 30 people working on the game, who seem to be focused more on keeping the dang thing running than actually producing new or updated content that would turn this messy shooter into something playable.

Well, a new report by Bloomberg suggests that we might not ever get to see this new-and-improved Anthem that Bioware has promised — because later this week, EA executives will be having a meeting where they’ll decide, once and for all, to try and resurrect this game or if they should just leave it to die.

This comes in the wake of several high-profile people leaving Bioware specifically due to Destiny — both how it was received and how it was produced. If you’ll recall, Kotaku put out a feature detailing all the crunch, abuse, and mismanagement that went into the title, which caused quite the stir in the community and helped explain how Bioware, a studio normally known for quality, put together such a decidedly… un-Bioware-like game.

EA, for its part, has said that it refuses to comment on “rumor and speculation”, but all things considered, the idea that such a meeting would be taking place makes a lot of sense to me. I also think the outcome of such a meeting is pretty much written in stone: EA has a longer history of scrapping games than salvaging them, and generally only exerts the effort to ‘rescue’ games too valuable to give up, like Star Wars Battlefront 2. Anthem has no such reputation, so I would expect that by weeks end, EA will have made the decision to pull the plug.

It’d be nice if they learned something from this, but let’s be honest: that’s not really EA’s style.