Did you ever hear the tragedy of Anthem? I thought not. It's not a story Electronic Arts would tell you.
It's a cautionary tale. A warning for any greedy publisher that thinks it's a good idea to take a developer famed for its critically acclaimed single-player RPGs (in this case Mass Effect/Dragon Age studio BioWare) and force them to make a painfully generic live service loot shooter.
Released back in 2019, Anthem swiftly established itself as one of the year's biggest duds. It's not that it was an awful game. It was a BioWare game, so it obviously had some good things going for it. But it was clunky, unpolished, and deathly boring.
With very little to actually do in the game, what few players there were quickly started to drop away. While there was talk from EA and BioWare about standing by the game and releasing major updates to win players back, it never happened. By 2021 Anthem was shut down for good.
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Anthem is a ghost town these days, but we'd hoped the game might've been able to die with a modicum of dignity. Alas, as Fanbyte reports, one TikToker was able to walk into GameStop and buy the three-year-old game for a penny.
“So I just went to GameStop and they had Anthem for a fucking penny,” ClockLava explains in their video. “When I went to buy this I was like ‘there’s no way this is actually a penny.'"
Yet it was. Anthem was so cheap, in fact, and GameStop so happy to shift a copy of the dead game, that the employee who sold it to ClockLava literally gave them a penny out of their own pocket.
As if that wasn't sad enough, Kotaku points out that flogging older/less desirable products for a penny is regular practice at GameStop. The term is called "pennying out", and apparently refers to the last stage in a products time on the shelves before the employees deem it so worthless that it's cheaper and easier to just throw the remaining copies away. Yikes.