Anthem sold 5 million copies, which sounds good until you compare it to Star Wars: Battlefront
It's generally understood that Anthem was a failure for developer BioWare. It was a developmental nightmare. It reviewed poorly. It fell short of its sales target of 6 million copies by the end of March 2019. And EA ultimately decided to pull the plug on the live-service game two years after launch. But the specifics of its commercial shortcomings haven't been clear, until now.
On Twitter, eagle-eyed «video game enthusiast» Timur222 posted an image from the LinkedIn page of Alexandre Scriabine, formerly EA's senior manager of global marketing strategy. Summarising his achievements during that job, Scriabine lists the social media views and, crucially, sales figures of numerous games that he worked on.
It won't shock you to hear that Anthem is at the bottom of the list, with «2M units sold week one, 5M lifetime.» In other words, its lifetime sales fell short of the target set for the game's first full month. What's especially telling is the time gap between the first figure and the second. Anthem clearly had a decent first week, especially when you consider, as Scriabine notes, it was «EA's first new franchise in a decade». But sales fell off sharply as everyone realised how underwhelming it was, taking a further two years to sell another three million, which likely explains why EA pulled the plug.
Moreover, the figures Scriabine provides for other EA games add stark perspective. Scriabine says that Battlefield 1 sold «21M units» in its first year, more than four times what Anthem managed in two, and that Jedi Fallen Order sold 10 million units (no context there, but those are presumably lifetime sales). The real big hitters, though, were EA's Star Wars: Battlefront games, which sold over 50 million units combined. Again,
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