On Its First Week, Anthem Sold Fewer Copies Than Mass Effect Andromeda

During Anthem’s first week of sales, Anthem was able to top the UK boxed game sales chart despite less than positive reviews. That might sound like good news, except that when the numbers are added up, it seems that Mass Effect Andromeda, BioWare’s previous game did better.

Anthem was only able to sell half of what Mass Effect Andromeda sold during its first week. Now, this doesn’t include digital sales via consoles or EA’s Origin service, but that remains a troubling indicator of the game’s overall reception.

There’s a lot of factors as to why sales were low with physical copies of the game, and the biggest one could be consumers now favoring digital copies than physical ones. To put more perspective with Anthem’s first week sales, let’s add Destiny 2 into the mix, another loot shooter that’s also online-only. If you compare it with Destiny 2’s physical sales during its first week back in September of 2017, you’ll see that Anthem only managed a quarter of that number.

Kingdom Hearts 3 and the Resident Evil 2 remake are two other big games that released in late January and reports indicate they are performing better than Anthem. In a report by gamesindustry.biz, it’s said that Electronic Arts hopes to sell 5-6M copies of Anthem in six weeks time. With Anthem performing lower than the aforementioned games, meeting that expectations will be difficult.

To make matters worse, BioWare’s loot shooter is just full of issues right now. Not only do many find Anthem’s storytelling lacking - a surprising development considering BioWare’s trademark has always been story — but it remains questionable that endgame content will hold the player base’s interest over the next few weeks.

A 90-day roadmap of content planned for Anthem was released by BioWare but only time will tell if players will be patient enough to wait for new content to arrive.

Anthem is now available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

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