The boss of digital PC storefront GOG has weighed in on the conversation around Anthem’s demise, saying that there may be a future in which fewer games could be developed and published if regulators demand that creators keep them alive forever.
Speaking to Eurogamer on January 15 after Anthem was laid to rest, GOG’s managing director, Maciej Gołębiewski, said it’s good that the discussion around game preservation is happening once again, but that the conversation gets a little tricky when talking about games that were designed as online-only experiences.
“There is a broader discussion to be had within the industry of what does an end-of-life cycle look like in games–what is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?” he said. “Should it just be buried and killed and no one can access it any more, and people who spent five or seven years working on it cannot really look at their creation any more because the service turned off? There is a very interesting and very complicated discussion that Stop Killing Games probably kick-started out of frustration.”
Referencing the lobbying group Stop Killing Games, which was formed in April 2024 in response to The Crew’s delisting, Gołębiewski said regulation sounds like a good idea in the short term, but any statutes around game preservation–particularly regarding live-service games, which are becoming the norm these days–could potentially have adverse effects in the long term.
“We want to make games live forever,” he said. “At the same time, if we put too many barriers on game creators and what the end-of-life cycle looks like, we might get fewer games, because people will be scared of, ‘Okay, now I need to put up the funds to create it, promote it, and then upkeep it for 10 years, 20 years, because the regulator said so.’ That might in turn cause there to be fewer cool games for gamers. I don’t have the perfect answer yet, but it’s good that the discussion is taking place.”
As of January 12, developer BioWare’s pretty-cool-but-ill-fated Iron Man-esque action-RPG is no longer playable. With Anthem being an online-only multiplayer game, you can’t boot up and fly around in the world of Coda now that publisher EA has pulled the server’s plug. It’s a bummer of a situation, and a blatant reminder that no game lasts forever, something GameSpot examined in a July 2025 feature when Ubisoft took the online racer The Crew permanently off the track in March 2024.
Gołębiewski’s comments come as Amazon announced its 2021 MMORPG New World: Aeternum will get Thanos snapped from all platforms on January 31, 2027. And if I can get personal for a second, this further heightens my fears that Full Circle’s 2025 skating sim Skate could get pulled offline forever in some future as well. Skate is still doing relatively well–with a consistent player count of approximately 3,500, according to player tracker SteamDB–but you can’t help but wonder just how long until Electronic Arts decides to hang the skateboard up.
In the end, as Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in a July 2025 shareholders meeting about The Crew: “You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone, and at some point, the service may be discontinued. Nothing is eternal. Support for all games cannot last forever.”