Anthem, BioWare’s famously ill-fated sci-fi loot shooter, is finally getting the plug pulled. EA has announced that servers for the live-service title will officially shut down on January 12, 2026—ending a saga that’s been limping along since its 2019 launch.
The first step? Starting August 15, 2025, Anthem will be delisted from EA Play and Game Pass, and players can no longer buy in-game currency. If you’ve still got shards rattling around, you can spend them until the lights go out, so shop like it’s the end of the world—because it kind of is.
Originally hyped as BioWare’s bold new IP, Anthem launched to stunning visuals, slick Javelin flight suits, and… not much else. Content was thin, storylines felt half-baked, and despite some strong post-launch patches, the promised “Anthem NEXT” reboot crashed and burned in early 2021. The writing’s been on the wall ever since. Now, with no offline mode, when the servers go dark, so does the game—permanently.
For the record, Anthem wasn’t a total disaster. It sold over 5 million copies, gave players some genuinely exhilarating Iron Man-lite moments, and hung around on EA Play long after the buzz wore off. But in an industry increasingly littered with the corpses of dead live-service games, Anthem’s demise highlights the bigger problem: digital preservation. If you can’t take it offline, was it ever really yours?
If you’ve got nostalgia—or morbid curiosity—you’ve got until January to dust off your Javelin, soar through Bastion one last time, and maybe complete that Stronghold you abandoned back in 2019. After that, the only Anthem you’ll hear is the sound of server silence.
