Thursday 7 January 2010

Video Game News: EA turning off more servers

You may or may not be aware if you’re an online gamer that EA runs it’s own servers for games, as a result of this they can chose to discontinue service for any of their games whenever they feel like it (as no alternative is available these games are left without online multiplayer). For those of you addicted to Microsoft’s Achievement system, or Sony’s Trophies, this will mean that a few of these will become unobtainable – so I suggest you finish these off quickly.

This is all a deliberate strategy on EA’s part to force an upgrade cycle, all bar one of these belong to annually released sports series. On XBox Live Microsoft provides the servers for games (and do not discontinue service) for an annual fee, EA negotiated to be the sole exception* to this purely so they were in a position to stop supporting older games, instead Xbox Live acts as a portal to the EA servers. This time around they seem to have accelerated the obsolescence as you will not a couple of ‘09 titles on the list below.

The following games will have their servers shutdown on February 2nd:
• FaceBreaker
• FIFA 07
• Live Draft Tracker
• Live Score Tracker
• NBA LIVE 07
• NBA STREET Homecourt
• NCAA March Madness 07
• NASCAR 09 (Europe version)
• NFL Tour
• NHL 07
• UEFA Champions League 2006-2007

Madden NFL 07 and 08 will go down a week later on February 9th. Then finally on April 6th Madden NFL 09 will go offline.

A full list of games that are no longer supported by EA can be found here http://www.ea.com/2/service-updates

*as far as I am aware.