10 More Video Games Cancelled For Ridiculous Reasons

BioWare's Anthem was widely expected to be the next big thing for the "live service" AAA shooter, so the world was shocked when it released to aggressively mediocre reviews, decrying its blandly formulaic story and gameplay, generic open-world format, and myriad technical issues.

In February 2020, a year after the game's initial release, BioWare announced that they were planning to give Anthem the Final Fantasy XIV-esque "soft-reboot" treatment, with a team of 30 employees committed to figuring out how to re-shape the game.

But another year on, BioWare confirmed that their Anthem Next revision had been cancelled, citing the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic:

"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."

While there's no denying that the pandemic has severely hampered games development around the world, and BioWare's stance is a sympathetic one to an extent, it's also not a particularly convincing excuse for shuttering a game most had already given up on.

With so many AAA video games still making it to release, it's far more likely that BioWare and EA basically used COVID-19 and a desire to avoid crunch as a scapegoat for discontinuing support.

In reality, they probably crunched the numbers and realised that it's not financially viable to try and reboot a project that interest has already waned in.