EA Is Completely Shutting Down ‘Anthem’ And No, You Can’t Get A Refund

One of the biggest misfires of the looter-shooter Destiny-copycat era was BioWare’s Anthem, a game that sapped loads of time and resources away from the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect to produce a half-baked release.

I kind of loved it.

Anthem had so, so many problems, of course, and it was not shocking that eventually, EA killed it instead of tripling down with more major updates. But now, EA has ended things for a second time. For good,

It has just been announced that Anthem servers will be shut down entirely on January 12, 2026, six months from now. The game has still been able to be played all this time, even since its “death” in February 2021, but now? Nothing. You won’t be able to play at all.

This is sad because Anthem will always be a “what could have been” for me with genuinely fun combat and moves toward fixing itself near the end. But this raises another modern-era games question about a title that people paid for but now will not be able to play at all. Despite single-player elements including an entire campaign you’d play solo, because the game needs a server connection, with those servers offline, you cannot play it. And no, no refunds will be issued for the game. The FAQ doesn’t address this, but it’s true, though it does have a section about how you can still spend your premium in-game currency until it’s shut down! Hooray!

The timing of this comes alongside a big movement called Stop Killing Games, a petition that has racked up 1.1 million supporters and is about exactly this: games that players paid for being summarily deleted from existence. Here’s the description:

“Stop Killing Games” is a consumer movement has started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods – with no stated expiration date – but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends. This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries.”

Right now this is largely based in Europe, and in some countries, progress has been made regarding the process in some places. This current movement is UK-focused, as a petition like this will be considered to be brought before Parliament if it gets 100,000 signatures. It has certainly gotten that. A separate movement to register complaints in France about The Crew being shut down is also part of this.

This is not some moneymaking scheme; Stop Killing Games does not want funding, but a genuine consumer movement, and now we can add Anthem to a long list of games that are unplayable because they were designed as online-only, even with single-player elements, and have shut those servers down so they are inaccessible. And no, no refunds. That seems very wrong.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.