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Anthem, BioWare's maligned loot shooter, is officially dead. This week's server shutdown rendered the always-online game completely unplayable even to those who already own it – a practice the Stop Killing Games initiative has been fighting for close to two years now. According to producer Mark Darrah, the seeds of the future Stop Killing Games envisions were in Anthem until shortly before launch.
In October 2025, Darrah published a post-mortem video running down Anthem's post-launch fortunes. Near the end, he describes his vision for Anthem Next – an ultimately abandoned plan he believed could've given the game a No Man's Sky-style turnaround. Crucially, this plan would've included locally hosted servers – something that already partially existed during development
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch," Darrah explains. "I don't know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that's playing the game."
These comments have come back into the news thanks to a nearly four-hour compilation video Darrah posted this week. Responding to those headlines, the Stop Killing Games account on Twitter says that end of life plans "for games like this is what SKG is about."
While Anthem is a pretty widely maligned title, Stop Killing Games says in a follow-up tweet that "it really is as simple as the principle of one man's trash is another man's treasure. If you put money into the game, you should have a voice on whether you get to keep it or not. You as the customer should have the final say as to when you're done with a game, not the company."
