EA Cancels Revision of Anthem After Much-Panned 2019 Launch

(Bloomberg) -- Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. has decided not to move forward with a planned revision of Anthem, an online video game that was widely criticized following its launch two years ago.

A small team at the EA-owned game developer BioWare had spent the past year and a half working on this revision, which they called Anthem Next. They had hoped to overhaul the game and get a second chance from fans.

February marked the end to Anthem Next’s incubation period, which meant that EA had to decide whether to move forward or abandon the project, Bloomberg previously reported. Earlier this month, EA executives reviewed the current version of Anthem Next and decided not to proceed.

In a Wednesday blog post, BioWare’s Christian Dailey pinned the cancellation on the coronavirus pandemic, writing that “working from home during the pandemic has had an impact on our productivity and not everything we had planned as a studio before Covid-19 can be accomplished without putting undue stress on our teams.”

(Updates with developer’s comments in the fourth paragraph.)

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