EA delay BioWare's Anthem to 2019, say it's not a delay
It totally is delayed
As rumours predicted, Electronic Arts have delayed BioWare's sci-fi online shooter doodad Anthem into 2019. It was previously slated for autumn of this year. Anthem is BioWare's shiny new persistent-world multiplayer shooter which... given how little they've shown and said about it, let's say it resembles Destiny but with Iron Man armour and more spacejungle. Despite the delay, EA say Anthem is not delayed. It's just that they're holding it back to space it apart from the yet-unannounced new Battlefield game they'll release this year, okay?
During their quarterly earnings conference call last night for investors--which obviously has a very business-y slant--EA said that Anthem would arrive in "Q4 FY19", which in human speak means in 2019 by the end of March.
"It's not a delay," EA's chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen told the Wall Street Journal later. "People are trying to create a story."
I do something similar myself sometimes. "I'm not crying," I'll insist. "There's simply water streaming from my eyes as I fall wailing to my knees, tear up fistfuls of turf, beat upon my breast, and howl curses to the sky. You need to stop being so dramatic."
Let's hop back to the conference call, where CEO Andrew Wilson said that the notdelay is "determined by portfolio balancing considerations, not for product readiness reasons." Bear in mind that this is a conference call for investors, so this is an answer intended to assure that everything is fine and this notdelay is good for their investment.
Wilson says that while Anthem is "tracking well on its development milestones" and EA are "really confident" about hitting the game's new notdelayed launch window, "it probably doesn't make sense to launch Anthem right up next to" the mysterious new Battlefield. I'd agree with that. Releasing Titanfall 2 one week after Battlefield 1 last year was damned stupid, and I'm still a bit annoyed that such an obvious misstep might sour my chances of seeing more of Respawn's mechtastic FPS.
Anyway! The point is, whatever the reason, Anthem totally is delayed.