BioWare shooter Anthem is heading towards its permanent shutdown on January 12, 2026, and while its former executive producer is "surprised it made it this long," he acknowledges that perhaps we want to "sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day" for the sake of game preservation.
Speaking in a recent interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays (highlighted by PC Gamer), former BioWare dev Mark Darrah, who served as an executive producer at the company for almost 24 years, is asked for his feelings on the shutdown of Anthem. "I mean, I knew it was going to happen eventually," he begins. "To be frank, I'm surprised it made it this long."
He goes on to suggest that "Anthem could have been built in a way where this wouldn't have been necessary," mentioning Destiny 2's peer-to-peer technology, before adding: "We didn't know how to do that, and we frankly couldn't afford to do that. But we could have done something, but it would have been an uglier game, probably would have had more latency issues. It would have been a worse experience second-to-second in order to get something that basically wouldn't need to ever be sunset."
Given the trade-off Darrah suggests would have had to have been made, the veteran dev asks: "I think we all need to think about is that the world we want?" However, he believes, "Kind of I think maybe it is, that we want to be in a world where we're willing to sacrifice some fidelity, sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day."
Of course, this is a hot topic given the ongoing Stop Killing Games movement, which aims to challenge the whole idea of games becoming totally unplayable because of their devs or publishers deciding to shut them down. Darrah says, "I do believe in game preservation, and we're losing a lot of stuff right now. Things are disappearing. I mean, forget Anthem, which was at least out for almost seven years by the time it'll go down. [...] Like, what about Concord?"
He continues: "My feeling on Stop Killing Games is that let's acknowledge that there are consequences to basically mandating that things not go away forever, but maybe those are consequences that we want to pay, that we want to accept."
Darrah elaborates with an analogy, noting: "We don't let chemical companies just flush their toxic waste into the nearest stream. There are consequences to us not letting them do it. It costs them money to not do that. But we've decided correctly as a society that that's a cost we're willing to make them pay."
Admittedly, Darrah doesn't know what the best solution is at this point when it comes to games, but he agrees, "we probably need something."
