Anthem will be effectively dead on Jan. 12, 2026. When Electronic Arts flips the switch, BioWare’s jetpack-powered live‑service shooter — always-online by design — will be unplayable across every platform. For a game that launched to mixed reviews in 2019 and lingered in maintenance and half-promises for years, the final hours have an odd, mournful energy: some people are sprinting for the Platinum trophy, others are taking slow, sentimental flights around the map, and a tiny group is trying to reverse-engineer a way to keep the servers alive.
A scramble for trophies and memories
Trophy hunters are the most visible face of this shutdown. With Anthem’s servers slated to go dark, every online achievement will become unobtainable — including the PlayStation Platinum. For players who treat trophies like a scrapbook of time spent, that impending permanence is a call to action. Across forums and social feeds, stories flood in: long-absent players reinstalling the game to say a proper goodbye; completionists grinding through collectibles and repeatable activities to push the completion meter to 100%; and a few who spent the final days clearing everything just to snag that rare Platinum badge.
There’s a bittersweet pride in many of these posts. Some say they poured a work-week’s worth of hours into finishing the game; others admit to being burned out by the collectible hunts but glad they finished before the clock ran out. One consistent refrain: Anthem’s core loop — flying in a Javelin, mixing abilities, and blasting through encounters — still scratches a distinct itch, even if the world around it never quite delivered the narrative depth expected from a BioWare title.
Why Anthem’s death matters beyond trophies
This isn’t just another delisting. Anthem’s shutdown is a reminder of what happens when a game is built as a service first: when the servers stop, the world disappears. Players lose progress, unique cosmetic items, and—perhaps most painfully for community members—the shared spaces where spontaneous encounters and memories occurred.
The closure also sits alongside a cluster of January server shutdowns affecting other online titles, underscoring how frequently the lifespan of modern games can be curtailed by business decisions. Anthem is the most prominent name in that group, but it isn’t alone in leaving players behind this month. See the wider list of January closures for context and dates Three Xbox games are shutting down their servers in January 2026.
For PlayStation users, the situation adds an extra sting: unlike single-player games you can archive and return to, these always-online titles offer no vault or local legacy. That contrast is interesting in the broader conversation about how we access games — particularly as cloud and streaming tech improves. Ironically, while some titles vanish with their servers, other services are expanding cloud-based library access; Sony’s recent work on the PlayStation Portal cloud streaming update shows how the industry is pulling in two opposite directions at once.
Fans trying to keep Anthem airborne
Not everyone is ready to let Anthem go quietly. Small communities have organized to capture the game’s network traffic and rebuild private servers. Groups like The Fort’s Forge are asking players to record communications between their clients and EA’s infrastructure so that hobbyists can study and possibly replicate the server behavior.
This kind of reverse-engineering is slow, legally and technically fraught, and dependent on community interest. Anthem’s player base, while dedicated, is comparatively small — which makes any private-server project a longshot. Still, the effort is driven by genuine affection: many contributors describe wanting to preserve the sensation of flying a Javelin more than anything else.
Looking back: what Anthem got right (and wrong)
Seven years after launch, it’s clearer which parts of Anthem have aged well. The Javelin flight model — letting players swoop, hover, and barrel-roll across gorgeous vistas — remains a standout engineering achievement. The four suit archetypes offered different combat rhythms; Colossus players loved bringing explosions, Interceptors savored melee bursts, and others appreciated the class synergies.
Where Anthem disappointed was the area that once defined BioWare: storytelling and player agency. The studio’s strengths in character-driven narratives didn’t translate to an always-online loot shooter, and many players felt the world never found narrative focus. The canceled rework and years of halting updates only compounded that sense of potential unfulfilled.
The last few days
If you’re still thinking of jumping back in: prioritize the time‑limited or account‑bound achievements first, and brace for some busy lobbies as others race the clock. If you’re simply revisiting for memories, take screenshots, record a final flight, and say hello to the people you met there; some players have already made threads collecting farewell snapshots.
Anthem’s shutdown is a small, quiet tragedy for some and a footnote for others. Either way, when the servers go down, the Javelins will stop flying — at least officially. The players left behind will keep the stories, screenshots, and the hope that one day someone might find a way to boot the skies open again.
If you want to replay Anthem’s final hours on better hardware, consoles such as the PS5 Pro can make the visuals and frame rates sing — though they won’t change the server clock.