It appears that Anthem could be dying a slow and painful death. One of the most anticipated titles this year, the BioWare looter shooter has endured no end of criticism since its release in February, and continues to lose its player base.
Twitch views were actually in double figures recently, and there's even talk that EA could make it free-to-play.
An updated list from Microsoft shows that Anthem isn't even among the 50 most played games on Xbox One. While these stats don't disclose an actual player count, things look pretty grim for the game that was once touted as the one to put the Destiny franchise out of business.
Per BF1Stats, Battlefield 1 is being played more than Anthem among Xbox users. The former is at the foot of the list and was engaging 7,650 concurrent players at the time of writing - but we're taking weekend inflation into consideration here. During the week, the count fluctuated between 2,500-7,500 and has peaked over 8,000 since then, while Anthem couldn't even manage to pull 2,500 gamers together at any point.
Of course, that's pretty dire for a game which has only been out for three months. To make things worse, Fallout 76 has more players. Fallout has been one of the most controversial launches in recent times, but the game has claimed the 27th spot on the list, proving it shouldn't be that hard for any multiplayer game to maintain a stronghold. Other games on the list include Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, Star Wars Battlefront II, Gears of War, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
One thing all of the aforementioned have in common? They're old. The fact that Anthem can't compete with them just goes to show how poorly players rate it. By the looks of things, it's only going to get worse. But, despite the lack of evidence to suggest this, perhaps the game is doing much better on PlayStation and PC.
If things get any dimmer - and that's very likely to be the case - going free-to-play could be the best option for the struggling title. But would players gravitate even then?