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  1. Games
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  3. Anthem

Stop Killing Games says Anthem's scrapped plans for local servers is what the initiative is all about: "You as the customer should have the final say as to when you're done with a game"

News
By Dustin Bailey published 14 January 2026

"If you put money into the game, you should have a voice on whether you get to keep it or not"

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Anthem
(Image credit: EA)
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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."

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  • Anthem GOG director fears regulation for live-service shutdowns might lead to "fewer cool games for gamers"
What Happened on Anthem - Part 3 Post Launch, Wishes, and Recommendations - YouTube What Happened on Anthem - Part 3 Post Launch, Wishes, and Recommendations - YouTube
Watch On

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."

"Stop Killing Games has actually changed the timeline": As EU petition comes to successful close, founder says "unending overtime" has him ready to "take a break for the next 10 years," but he's sticking around until it's done'

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TOPICS
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Dustin Bailey
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Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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