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Grant Taylor-Hill·
News
··1 min read

Anthem Sold 2 Million Copies in One Week And Then Died

anthem copies

Anthem was released in February 2019 to a middle-of-the-road reception following a rampant marketing campaign from EA and developer BioWare that included a launch trailer directed by Neill Blomkamp. It suffered immeasurably over the years, with the ambitious ‘looter shooter’ live service game crumbling post-launch, despite a reported two million copies being sold in just one week.

It was further reported by a former Electronic Arts manager on LinkedIn that, in its lifetime, Anthem sold five million copies, falling short of EA’s expectations. It was ultimately abandoned by BioWare, with the roadmap being mostly undelivered, and over time, the player count plunged.

A Success, Until It Wasn’t

In earlier marketing materials, Anthem looked superb. It boasted an intriguing story, putting players in a post-apocalyptic world where they’d become a ‘Freelancer’, a last defender of the people against a range of aggressive, oppressive enemies made up of super-sized insects, beastly creatures, and bloodthirsty humans.

However, this live service game didn’t pan out quite as planned for BioWare, and thanks to a series of technical issues that were present at the launch, the game started wavering quite early on. It has secured a massive audience thanks to the promotional campaign, but that audience abandoned this attractive and admittedly quite exciting game relatively fast.

It was revealed on the LinkedIn profile of a former Senior Global Marketing Manager (thanks to Timur222) at EA that Anthem shipped two million copies in seven days, which is quite huge for any new IP. It then sold a total of five million copies in its lifetime – but it’s expected that in 2024, it could be taken offline. In recent months, Electronic Arts has been pulling offline a wide array of games, from Mirror’s Edge Catalyst to the Bad Company series of Battlefield games. Could Anthem be the next game to suffer from that treatment?

Did you ever play Anthem? Was it that bad of an experience for you?

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that COD 2025 will be a Black Ops II sequel

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Grant Taylor-Hill
(Senior Editor) Grant is a lifelong, multi-platform gamer with a passion for journalism and more than ten years' experience in the industry. He'll try any game once, and when he's not playing them, he's watching them, being as he is an avid esports fan.

14 Comments

  3. I love Anthem and I love as heartbroken when they announced they were abandoning it. I think they made a huge mistake just letting it go. It has TONS of potential.

  4. I played anthem when the price dropped to around 15 to 20 bucks.

    For that price the game was great. Yeah, it had issues but with Anthem Next coming I was ready to get the gear and try to understand this edgy angst storyline.

    Naturally Anthem Next didn’t pan out and was canceled after the new dev team and their leader showcased new stuff being worked on/coming soon.

    With how No Man Sky came out a decent game (even though I hate it) I hoped Anthem could too. It could’ve if EA didn’t kill it.

    Now I’m more careful of games from EA, Ubisoft, Platinum Games and random new Devs because of these GaaS nonsense. Also games being abandoned long before their 5-10 year claim of support and updates.

  6. I played it and loved it. The story was good. The mp was fun. I think this was the era of “online comments matter more than the people playing the game.”

    It was one of those “cool to hate” games.

    I stopped playing because they stopped supporting it. It did play like Destiny lite.

    Launch was not solid but the update that fixed this really made the game feel alive.

    It’s too bad. The world and lore were really well designed.

  7. “following a rampant marketing campaign”

    I keep hearing about Anthem’s marketing campaign and being confused. I was exactly the target market, living in a major city, and don’t remember ever seeing a scrap of marketing for it. I remember Homefront marketing COMPLETELY saturating every MTA station that year, though!

  8. Anthem was a fun game with immense potential which if they had stuck to it like CD Projekt Red did with Cyberpunk they would have had a hit but they abandoned it too early.

  9. Played the game… loved it. Wanted more, but never got it. Wish someone would pick it up and revive it

  10. For me I enjoyed anthem. The big problem with a lot of people was lack of content. Atrocious drop rates for the highest rarity gear. And that one of the trailers was a lie. The trailer in question featured gear that was never actually in the game.

  11. I did not have a lot of the game breaking bugs that people had issue with and found the game to be quite fun. Yes it had bugs and flaws, but looking back at past games there are many that are still bugged to this day never patched and manage to succeed. The issue with the player base that I notice the most and the main complaint of most these days that play it is the fact that ea/bioware abandoned it at all. There is still a player base for this game and if they were to resume work on it or bring about a better version the players would increase. Every sale there has been an influx of players and quite a few people across reddit and the like turn out to enjoy what there is to the game. All mainly having the simple request of just more. An old petition from when 2.0 got canceled has also been kicked up quite a few times also gaining signatures slowly. I for one do think they pulled the development plug way too soon and it has the potential to come out of the dust.

  12. This game was fun as all heck when I started it. Random people were plentiful and the system allowed matchmaking so I always had a team to raid with, unlike destiny. The one thing that really made me angry was the drop rates. After working so hard on a ridiculously tough raid, my teammates and I would yell in celebration, only for the boss to drop some epic items when all I needed was legendaries. Could never get to max potential, and the bullet sponging was ridiculous. The fact they had me grinding so hard for so little reallys erks me.

  13. Nobody seems to have picked up on the literal asset re-use from Anthem in the new Dreadwolf trailer. The camera shot of “Antiva” in Dreadwolf is lifted right out of the Anthem Cataclysm content, I can literally point to all the Anthem point orb spots in “Antiva.” This is the explanation as to why the Anthem roadmap got canned. When the Anthem team asked for more staff, they were working on the same assets as Dreadwolf. What exec looking at that does not think, “hey, why would we pay for two teams working on the same assets?” (especially with Dragon Age as one of them)… buh bye Anthem at that point.

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