If a new piece of hardware breaks compatibility with old software, at least you have the ability to hook up the old hardware. When Electronic Arts closes down the online services for a bunch of games on August 11, there's no going back. SKATE, Army of Two and others are going offline.
"The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy," reads the company's support site. "The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired. But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles below a point--fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles--where it’s feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running."
EA is usually pretty clear about when its games are going offline. You can view a whole list of what games have moved into the dark on the same support website. Here's what's gone in just a few weeks:
- Army of Two (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- Army of Two Demo (Xbox 360)
- Battlefield 2142 Demo (PC)
- Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (Xbox 360)
- Battlefield 2: Modern Combat Demo (Xbox 360)
- Medal of Honor Airborne (PSP)
- Medal of Honor Heroes 2 (PSP, Wii)
- NASCAR 09 (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- NCAA Basketball 10 (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- NCAA Football 10 (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- Need for Speed Most Wanted (PC, Xbox 360)
- Need for Speed Undercover (PSP)
- SKATE (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 (PSP, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii)
- Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 11 Demo (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
In addition to these titles, EA plans to end support for both Madden NFL 10 and NHL 10 as of October 1st. If for some reason you're especially fond of the rosters in either of these two-year-old sports games, you might want to start getting as many games in as you can.
Don't play many EA games online.
Wow, they were still supporting like 7 year old games. Can't say I'm surprised, given none of those are subscription games, so at this point they're just losing money.
Nothing there too shocking or controversial, I think. Certainly can't blame them.
Oh no now what are me and my Army of Two clan going to do on Friday nights? Oh no wait that never existed...
None of these are games that I expect many people to still be playing rather than the sequels. This is bound to happen and it's good of them to continue services for several years after official releases.
Nothing shocking, really. Can't remember when I played any of those games online last.
The Army of Two one is kinda bizarre. It's not that old yet and the only way you should ever play Army of Two is in Co-Op.
I hope you guys play all these games for TNT on August 11th!
Is it though? Do you play any of these games still? Know anyone that does? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but they aren't stupid. They're probably shutting these specific ones down because hardly anyone will care.
Makes sense. If you are still playing any of these games well...tough tits toots!
So.. are they going to continue to do this with games that you bought an Online Pass for? What if I want to keep playing the game I paid specifically to play online?
Alas, the tides of time surge ever on...
They're getting pretty aggressive about curtailing the online life of their sports games, two years is not a long time compared to some of the other games they're shutting down. Are more people playing AoT: 40th Day online right now than PGA '10?
I only see one PC game on there and I am wondering why. Cause it is a demo?
That's pretty fucking lame. I still hadn't gotten around to Army of Two (yes, I know it's almost a whopping three years old).
It would seem to me that it would be reasonable to require that games be supported for the life of the console. Yes, I know some matchmaking service may have to be run by the developer or something, but all the heavy load is put on users since games are usually hosted on the console.
The problem with seeing this as normal operations is that it isn't. There is no need to switch off the old 486 down the hall that is just sitting there making sure matchmaking and CD key auth is working for a title. In the modern server environment then virtual-box it onto one of your blade arrays and if the numbers are low then you haven't lost anything because the servers will be doing the other stuff you put on them. It means you have a good reason to say "sorry auth for these 6 year old games die for an evening, we had a tenfold increase in users randomly that day and we didn't expect it so didn't have the excess capacity to support it. Our bad" but to just switch off games is to remove significant value from old games (in cases of co-op led titles it removes the main component). Of course EA does this to keep costs low by pushing new titles in a franchise or to avoid paying for any techs to run basic maintenance (like moving code to VMs or running a few blades more than the currently do to deal with the small trickle traffic) but for some reason that doesn't lead them to offering the titles with lower prices at point of sale.
Hopefully people will continue to care about games and the history of them and so work out ways of unbreaking any of these games so in the future we can go back and see them as they should be.
But I haven't played those games yet! EA should cater directly to me!