Anthem, being a live-service game, could easily have shut down at some point in time even if it had been incredibly successful. That’s just the nature of the format: If there’s not enough money being made, there’s no incentive to keep servers running. The reality that we’re currently in is one where Anthem performed incredibly poorly, and as of next year, will be completely unplayable. And in a recent interview, the game’s executive producer Mark Darrah said that he “always knew it was going to go away eventually.”

“Anthem could have been built in a way where this wouldn’t be necessary,” Darrah said. As an example of what he means, he pointed to Destiny and how it has “sophisticated bits of technology for host migration,” and the fact that it’s peer-to-peer–meaning one computer can act as a server for another without the need for a central server. “We didn’t know how to do that, and we frankly couldn’t afford to do that,” Darrah continued. “But we could have done something.”

He does also admit that the game likely would have been uglier, had more latency issues, and a worse experience “second-to-second” to get a game that wouldn’t need to be sunset down the line. On the other side of things, he also posited how maybe it would be better to have a world where games don’t have such high fidelity, but at least they would always be playable.

Darrah recently spoke about what he thinks went wrong with Anthem in a YouTube video posted to his own channel.

Discussions around games preservation have been quite prevalent recently. The Stop Killing Games movement has seen a lot of traction in particular when it comes to live-service games being shut down, and some devs have found Nintendo’s move to use Switch 2 Game-Key Cards as a disappointing one for games preservation.

If you want to give Anthem one last go before it shuts down, it’d be best to do so soon, as servers will sunset in just a few months time on January 12, 2026.