After years of hype and anticipation, Anthem may very well go down as one of the biggest flops of this entire generation. The game stands as one of the lowest-rated BioWare games in history, it failed to meet EA's sales expectations, and now it reportedly has about 2,500 concurrent active players on Xbox One in North America, which is disastrous for a live-service game.
This is according to Reddit user _Robbie, who discovered that Anthem isn't even currently in the top 50 most-played Xbox Live games. Microsoft keeps a running list available of the most-played games, and right now, Battlefield 1 is last on the list. According to Battlefield 1 stat-tracking website BF1Stats, the game bounces between 2,500 on the low end and 7,500 on the high end.
Not only does this mean Anthem has fewer active players than Battlefield 1, which released all the way back in 2016, but it has also fewer players than Fallout 76. Similarly to Anthem, Fallout 76 had a great deal of hype behind it before it released to poor reviews, angry fans, and a seemingly never-ending parade of PR guffaws. Despite this and being a few months older, Fallout 76 has more active players than Anthem does, at least on Xbox One.
BioWare says it's committed to Anthem, but we don't know how it will be viable for the studio to stick with the game if its active players don't increase. Unless Anthem has a significantly larger community on PC and PS4, there doesn't seem to be enough people playing the game to justify supporting it with new content updates.
At this point, it's hard to see how BioWare can possibly salvage Anthem, unless the game has a particularly impressive E3 2019 showing. However, even then, some fans may be hesitant to give the game a second chance. After all, Anthem's promised 90 day road map was delayed, with still no sign of some of the content promised. It may be hard for fans to believe that they will even get whatever is shown at E3.
One way that EA would be able to bolster Anthem's active player count is by making the game free-to-play, which is rumored to be announced at E3. Whether or not that comes to pass remains to be seen, but fans will find out within the next couple of weeks.
Anthem is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.