‘Anthem’ Shuts Down January 12th And, Poof!, There Goes All That Creative Culture

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many levels, of course. When it comes to art, no one person or group of people get to determine what is important culture and what isn’t. At the present, video games are also a massive cultural force in art and entertainment, with the quality and artistic nature of games having never been higher. And, finally, the bargain that copyright law is supposed to be, where a limited monopoly is granted in exchange for the art it covers eventually going into the public domain, isn’t subject to anyone’s subjective thoughts as to what artforms are important and what isn’t.

When games disappear, that is culture disappearing. When no effort is made to preserve this art, either directly or by prematurely freeing the art into the public domain, that breaks the copyright bargain. The publisher got the monoploy, but the public doesn’t get their end of the deal. Honestly, none of the above should be terribly controversial.

I’m going to try to innoculate against a derivative of all of that for this post by saying the following: it also doesn’t matter if the art that comprises a video game quality is even any good, or if the public generally thinks it’s good. And that brings me to the news that Bioware’s Anthem game will become unplayable next week.

We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.

While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.

Was Anthem any good? I have no idea; I have never played it. My comrade in arms, Karl Bode, mentioned to me that he really liked it. Having discussed video games with Karl for several years, that’s mostly good enough for me. Still, let’s say it was trash. It certainly wasn’t a success by industry standards in terms of sales. And none of that matters.

Bioware could have done several things to make this not a story about the pure disappearance of culture. It chose not to do so. There was no working with fans to cheaply or freely license some fan-run servers. No release of source code. Nothing in the reasonably short list of demands the folks that run the Stop Killing Games campaign have if we’re going to let these shutdowns continue. It’s just… gone.

If there’s one thing that is true in art and culture, it certainly must be that we learn absolutely as much from failure as success. From bad art as much as good art. From the niche as much as the wildly popular. But in cases like Anthem, class is cut short and the learning largely stops because it all just vanishes into the ether. A whisp of cultural smoke disappearing into the sky.

And I keep coming back to the copyright bargain. The public is being shortchanged on what it is owed. If this were music we were talking about, or literature, that suddenly vanished from the universe simply because a record label or publisher decided to disappear it, there would be outrage. The same should be true for the gaming industry.

It shouldn’t be that Bioware can at once benefit from copyright law to make money and leave it such that this same law prevents the art from ever entering the public domain.