Anthem Shutting Down: What Happens to Your Creative Culture?
BioWare’s Anthem will soon be unplayable, and that’s a loss for video game culture, even if teh game itself wasn’t a critical success. EA plans to shut down the game’s servers next week, effectively ending access to the 2019 jetpack-powered shooter.
This situation highlights a growing problem wiht video game preservation. When publishers discontinue servers for games requiring them, pieces of art and culture disappear. This breaks the fundamental agreement behind copyright law: a limited monopoly for creators in exchange for eventual public access to their work.
it doesn’t matter if a game is considered “good” or popular. The value of preservation isn’t tied to subjective quality. The issue is that when games vanish, culture vanishes with them. Publishers receive the benefits of copyright, but the public is denied its share of the bargain.
Many dismiss video games as trivial, but that argument fails on multiple levels.No single person or group should dictate what constitutes valuable culture. Video games are now a importent art form and entertainment medium, with quality and artistic merit continually increasing.
As ars Technica notes:
We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem-BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter-to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final prospect to play one of BioWare’s most aspiring projects.