EA to shut down online services for older titles

If you have been enjoying EA’s offering of mobile games in the past, you will have no doubt heard about some of EA’s hiccups with some of their recent games, such as Battlefield 3: Aftershock and The Simpsons: Tapped Out. While we know that EA will ultimately be ending online services to Battlefield 3: Aftershock, it seems that’s not the end of it as the games publisher has recently outed a list of games whose online services will be seeing a shutdown in March and April of 2012.

April 13, 2012 — Online Services Shutdown

BOOM BLOX Bash Party for Wii
Burnout™ Revenge for Xbox 360
EA Create for PC, PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360
EA Sports Active 2.0 for PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360
EA Sports Active NFL Training Camp for Wii
FIFA 10 for PlayStation Portable and Wii
The Godfather™ II for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
MMA for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Need for Speed™ ProStreet for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
The Saboteur™ (loss of The Midnight Club access) for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Spare Parts for PlayStation 3 Xbox 360

March 31, 2012 — Online Services Shutdown

BATTLEFIELD™ 3: Aftershock for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
Fantasi Safari for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
Ghost Harvest for iPhone

According to EA who released a statement to address this move:

The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy. 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 to a level — fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles — where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.

In any case, it looks like if you see one of your favorite games listed above, you’ve probably got a couple of weeks to a month to enjoy the game before EA pulls the plug!

Filed in Gaming. Read more about EA.