Following Anthem's rough launch, current and former BioWare employees say its development was hampered by EA's Frostbite engine and poor leadership
It wasn't even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare …
Context & Ripple Effects
Kotaku's postmortem lands two years after Anthem's rough launch, with current and former BioWare employees pointing to two culprits: EA's Frostbite engine, built for shooters and repurposed for a studio that fought it throughout production, and leadership that kept the project — once not even meant to be called Anthem — on course anyway.
The account fits a pattern the corpus keeps documenting: staff-sourced postmortems of troubled AAA productions, from the CD Projekt employees describing Cyberpunk 2077's unchecked ambition to sources detailing EA's own struggles on the next Battlefield, where few staff believed leadership's 100-million-player target was achievable even at a $400M+ budget.
First-order effects
- BioWare's internal account of Anthem becomes public record, putting pressure on EA leadership to defend both its Frostbite-as-shared-engine strategy and the management chain that oversaw the game.
Second-order effects
- EA's subsequent projects show the same symptoms repeating rather than being fixed — sources describe the next Battlefield suffering from leadership credibility problems despite its $400M+ budget, and the company later cut 300-400 roles and canceled incubation projects.
Third-order effects
- Anonymous-staff postmortems are becoming the industry's de facto accountability mechanism for AAA development failures, forcing publishers like EA and CD Projekt to reckon publicly with engine debt and planning culture after each high-profile launch.
The trend: Big-budget game development is increasingly judged by employee-sourced postmortems that expose how shared engines and top-down targets shape — and derail — flagship titles.