Poor, poor Anthem. Even as BioWare continues scrambling to perform triage on the ailing online shooter, it appears that the game is continuing to hemorrhage players at an alarming rate, resulting in matchmaking problems that are compounding the game’s existing issues. A recent report from Forbes details the ongoing decline of the game’s playerbase, noting that matchmaking for activities — particularly on higher difficulties — often fails to matchmake players into full teams, presumably due to a lack of players in queue.
A plethora of posts on the game’s subreddit corroborate this information: “Tried to do a GM2 Stronghold, no one else is with me, so I twice attempt to join an ongoing one — there isn’t anyone playing a Stronghold,” one player posts, adding, “Help, I feel like the only Freelancer left.” There’s no shortage of similar stories. Another Reddit user conducted an unofficial survey of the subreddit and found that out of the 1,650 players who responded, 52.7% reported that they had not logged into the game in the past two weeks. Of the roughly 47% of players who said they had logged in, nearly half of them reported that they had spent only a total of one to ten hours in the game.
In the wake of news that many of the features for the “Act 1” portion of the game’s planned content updates have been postponed for an unknown amount of time despite (or perhaps because of) the “crunch-heavy” environment at BioWare, it seems that Anthem players are hastily abandoning ship. It may not be too late just yet, though; in the aforementioned survey, 51.5% of the players who reported they had quit playing Anthem said that they would consider returning depending on future updates. It’s clear that many players, including our own Tyler, like — or at least want to like — the game, but at the rate things are going, there’s no telling if BioWare will be able to turn the ship around in time.
