Anthem’s launch was troubled, and the project was eventually cancelled.
Recently, BioWare veteran Mark Darrah published a new video reflecting on what happened with Anthem. This installment focuses on the post-release period.
Electronic Arts had faced rocky launches before — for example, The Sims 4 and Battlefield 4 — but those titles were ultimately salvaged. With Anthem, however, EA took a different route, and Darrah explained the reasoning:
Battlefield sold exceptionally well — more than 10 million copies — so it was, to an extent, deemed too big to fail. It was already an enormous franchise, and efforts were concentrated on restoring it to its former stature. Anthem, by contrast, was a new experiment: there was no clear vision, no obvious roadmap, and no guarantee it would reach comparable popularity.
There was another factor. According to Darrah, an “even more important factor” was BioWare’s studio structure — the studio is known for franchises like Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Mass Effect, but not for Anthem. If a new experiment failed, developers could simply return to their established series.
With DICE and Battlefield 4 the situation was entirely different: the choice was to either fix the troubled game or close the studio:
For much of its recent history, EA has been hesitant to shutter studios. At BioWare, however, where two, three, or sometimes even four projects compete for the same resources, when something goes off track there’s always another team urgently needing those people — creating continual pressure that diverts resources away.
Source: iXBT.games