Bioware's 'Destiny killer' may be gone, but oh, how its legacy lives on

TL;DR:

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a massive rise in live-service games with huge AAA budgets that close after failing to find an audience. […] Some studios are finally learning that live service is not always a guaranteed cash cow, and in retrospect Anthem feels like an early symptom of the carnage we’re seeing now. […] Too often, as we’ve seen from the staggering number of layoffs already in 2024, it’s the ordinary people, the rank-and-file developers, who are paying the price. Anthem may have been a warning, but unfortunately, it seems to have gone unheeded.

  • Rin
    5•9 months ago

    Granted a lot of the failures with Anthem was thanks to corporate meddling, like EA forcing them to switch to an engine mid development that wasn’t equipped for the game they wanted to make as they insisted on using something in-house, and then forcing them to release it in an unfinished and buggy state. Iirc the devs even cared about the project too, but once again EA ruins something.

    I remember thinking it had some neat gameplay concepts from the footage I saw, it just needed more polishing.