Following “careful consideration”, publisher EA and developer BioWare are shutting down Anthem in January.
Bioware is taking the servers for the beleaguered multiplayer shooter offline on 12th January, 2026. Given that it is a fully online game, and requires an internet connection to play, this means it won’t be available in any way, shape or form beyond that date.
As of now, Anthem players will not be able to purchase any in-game currency. Instead, players will need to use up the last of their already acquired in-game funds, as the Bioware team gets ready to sunset the servers.
Anthem will be removed from the EA Play playlist next month, on 15th August. Meanwhile, if Anthem has been already purchased and in libraries, users will still be able to redownload the game and play until the servers shut down next year.
“We deeply appreciate your dedication, passion and support over the years and we’d like to thank you for that,” Anthem’s team wrote in a post announcing the shut down. It added the shut down has not resulted in any layoffs within the team. This will no doubt be a relief, given EA recently cancelled its single-player Black Panther game and closed the developer behind it, Cliffhanger Studios.
Anthem initially released in 2019, but had a rocky start. In 2020, Bioware then announced it was planning to overhaul its online shooter, which the studio said would deliver a “substantial reinvention” of the core Anthem experience. The following year, development on this major overhaul ceased. Soon after, Anthem’s director Jonathan Warner announced he was leaving BioWare.
“Beautiful, broken, with flashes of brilliance, Anthem is a disorganised mess in search of a reason to be,” reads Eurogamer’s original Anthem review from 2019.