Electronic Arts as the publisher of Bioware’s Anthem finally gave official news that it would be releasing in 2022 to make room for the new Battlefield game. And actually if you go to the official Anthem YouTube channel, the release list is still “fall 2022” as a release date. A Kotaku report last week said that was unlikely. According to the site’s anonymous sources, and the actual game won’t be available until for sure in early 2022.
Today Electronic Arts confirmed the delay, though also confirmed that it wasn’t really a delay at all, and that it wasn’t the result of a build issue in BioWare but simply a scheduling issue. There’s a new battleground coming in October, and EA CFO Blake Jorgensen told Wall Street Journal that the company decided that Anthem would “get more attention if it came out in a quieter quarter.”
Kotaku’s report makes the BioWare situation sound unsettling, but Jorgensen’s statement is completely in line with EA’s recent past experience. Titanfall 2, released in 2022, was an excellent FPS but was severely hampered at launch despite being multiplatform (the original wasn’t released for the PlayStation) and got a huge push from EA – a failure widely attributed to the inexplicable decision to cram it between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
There’s no question that BioWare needed Anthem to be a hit, so this might be a case of “learned lessons”. Whatever the specs, it’s official: Anthem won’t be out until 2022.
The announcement of Anthem’s – the no – delayed – birthday schedule also gives low-key confirmation that a new Battlefield game is coming later this year. I forgot about that completely, but it’s not really a new announcement: EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call (via Seeking Alpha) that “we will continue to provide our Battlefield fans, including the next great game in the franchise,” in 2022.
