"Bankrupt EA" was on the list of fears at BioWare as it weighed up Mass Effect servers, says former exec: "There's a point at which you are optimizing for an unlikely or virtually unfathomable situation”

2019 action role-playing game Anthem has one foot in death's door now that developer BioWare plans to shut its servers down for good in January, but former BioWare producer Mark Darrah doesn't seem particularly surprised.

He discusses his involvement with the game's development in a new YouTube video, in which he describes BioWare's tendency toward dysfunctional decision making – especially when it comes to online servers.

"If you try to launch a mission in Anthem and you don't have a full party, it doesn't ask you if you're sure that you want to launch with an incomplete party. It asks you the opposite question: It asks you if you want to wait and fill out your party," Darrah says.

He acquiesces that, "to a minor extent", this irritating system could limit the number of servers with only one person in them, but, "Did it make the game slightly annoying to every single person who tried? Yeah, absolutely."

It didn't matter to BioWare – the developer is like a doomsday prepper. Darrah continues to say that, "Interestingly, almost this exact argument" – that preventing disaster is always worth the sacrifice – "was made about Mass Effect multiplayer, because [BioWare was] worried that the matching servers or something like that was going to bankrupt EA if enough people tried to connect to it at the same time."

Ultimately, Darrah thinks "it's important to encourage people to group up, but there's a point at which you are optimizing for an unlikely or virtually unfathomable situation."

As Anthem faces shutdown amid Stop Killing Games movement, producer says maybe we want to "sacrifice some things in order to get it so that games don't just vanish one day."