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Selling online games and then shutting down the service should forfeit the right to interfere with reverse engineering projects. Maybe even require opening up the service specs so reverse engineering wouldn't be needed.
Yeah, we need solutions to this issue as it's happening more and more with always-online games. We're at risk of losing all these games to history without the ability to keep them in the archives
Just allow user hosted servers like back in the day
I think that's absolutely fair, it will never happen, but I think it should. If you want a game that has online aspects of it and no longer want to host it that's fine, but then the game should be mandated to go open source and you officially relinquish the copyright. I think that's a very fair tradeoff, you don't want to pay for servers anymore which means you don't think there's any profit left in it, so prove it by making it FOSS.
and you officially relinquish the copyright. I think that’s a very fair tradeoff
Indeed. Specifically, if a company wants to benefit from society-funded copyright enforcement, then society must get something worthy of the cost. In this case, that's the cultural enrichment brought by the game. If the game vanishes, then the company hasn't held up their end of the deal.
TL;DR:
EA Games Shutting Down By The End Of 2023
September 7, 2023
Crysis 3 for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One (backwards compatibility), Steam and EA App
October 10, 2023
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 for Xbox 360 and on PlayStation 3
October 30, 2023
Restaurant DASH: Gordon Ramsay for Apple, Google, and Amazon
November 6, 2023
FIFA 18 for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4
FIFA 19 for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4
FIFA 20 for Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4
FIFA 21 for Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5
December 8, 2023
Battlefield 1943 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Battlefield Bad Company for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Battlefield Bad Company 2 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Dead Space 2 on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360
Dante’s Inferno on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and Xbox 360Fifa 21 was released October 2020. 3 years is how long you can expect EA to let you play a game you paid for. That should be illegal.
If only governments had a backbone to shut down this "actually it was just a license" bulshit. A purchase is a purchase. People should be able to play and host these games forever.
Huh 1943 was still up, was a nice remake from what I recall. I understand the whole shutting down games sucks but this list isn't highly played I assume. No offense meant to those who play it, and it does suck when agame you want to play goes down. I had the opposite issue where servers were up but no one played with Shadowrun (Xbox 360)
With current battlefield you can at least mostly play Bad Company, and I assume golf has something current. But yeah sucks in it's way but free servers and blah blah blah.
Man I played the shit out of Shadowrun on 360. I totally think it could be a competitive game that people would watch nowadays.
Bad company 2 nooooo!
Admittedly haven’t checked in for ~a year but last I checked that game still rips. “Portal” or whatever it’s called in the new one captures none of the magic.
RIP
Some of those are pretty old, so I guess I understand, but shutting down 2 year old FIFA games seems malicious.
I think for FIFA games it's related with the expired license with FIFA itself.
Seems like poor license planning to me.
To compare: Dead by Daylight lost its licensing partnership with Netflix’s Stranger Things. Players could still use the characters they bought in online matches, they just weren’t available for purchase anymore.
Yeah but the license is literally in the name. which is why the new game is mostly the same but with new name EA Sports FC
Sucks that BC2 is out of commission now. These games should always have private server options, but it's EA we're talking about. What they don't understand is that shutting this down won't make people buy 2042, if they didn't already. It's the same as the piracy situation. It's not a price issue, it's a service issue
Is it sad or just amusing that I'd rather play BC2 over Battlefield 2042? It's just way more satisfying.
You're not alone at all
I feel like I remember BC2 having dedicated servers.
I thought so too, but at least at first glance it doesn't appear to be this way. Thankfully both BF3 and 4 have dedicated servers
Honestly, given that it's EA I'm surprised the servers for the PS3/360 games weren't shut down years ago. Seems like the sort of thing they would have done in the middle of the PS4/Xbox One generation. Also surprised that Dante's Inferno had a PSP release and that it had online features.
Damn, BF 1943 and BC2... I played both of those quite a lot. Now they are lost forever, never to be revisited (because, realistically, the multiplayer is the main, core experience of a BF game), unlike the 90s/2000s games of my youth that are still available in some form or other.
For me this is kind of a grim reminder that one day BF1 will be on this kind of list... Damn.
There really needs to be a better understanding at a consumer protection level that new entries in a property are not valid absolute substitute products for previous entries (you shouldn't be able to sunset any online title with no resource to play it again under the reasoning of "well, there's a newer one, just buy that dude"). Ideally some form of measure should be in place to be able to preserve or recreate the online functionalities of any title (especially if those functionalities are the core of the experience) before its functionalities are taken down.
"It's old"/"there's a newer one"/"only x people are playing"/"we might remaster/remake it in the future" shouldn't be valid excuses to erase any possibility of ever playing a game again, just release a minimum of resources for people to try to get it running again in some basement if they ever want to in the future. People are still playing Resident Evil Outbreak from fucking 20 years ago online on reverse engineered infrastructure, eventually there's ALWAYS demand.
But then again, right now the tv and film industry are facing a similar situation with streaming only shows getting taken down from their platforms with no alternative, basically being erased forever, and no measures have been taken against that soooo
This is why the 7 seas exists and should continue to do.
These games aren’t going away, just their online features.
I doubt pirate copies will bring those features back. Many of these don’t even have multiplayer.
Just so you are aware, there are tons of active communities actively and currently maintaining live multiplayer servers for old games that had their official servers shut down. All through pirates.
Star wars galaxies and Monster Hunter Tri are two good examples. I haven't checked galaxies in a while, but monster hunter tri just unlocked a multiplayer server that has been shut down for a decade.
If a fan community loves a game enough it's still got an active server somewhere. Pirates are 100% bringing online features to their communities.
Also, I guess since you didn't know, there are hundreds of video games that currently have multiplayer enabled despite no multiplayer options when the game was originally released. You are really underestimating the amount of effort random pirates will put into making a 30 year old game playable with online multiplayer. Games like Skyrim, famous for being single player, now have multiplayer options.
I’m well aware, I even play some of them. But I don’t think Dante’s Inferno will be one of those. And these community patches always work with retail/steam copies with the exceptions usually being delisted or MMOs.
Shitty EA being shitty
Stop buying these games. Or at least from EA
Don't worry. The internet of gamers will boycott them completely. Not raising the boycott until around 2 minutes into the next game trailer they put out.
"Server" means? Authentication (DRM), Multiplayer or purely online Games? I see Crysis 3 on Steam and Dead Space 2 on PC on this list, so it's not the later.
Wow, I genuinely thought BFBC2 was already closed down.
I don't play online games, but how much does this cripple the playability of some of these games if you take away the online element??
What online services did dante's inferno use?
I feel like we need to update copyright for modern software. In order to register your copyright, you should store the source code for the software with library of Congress, and the build tool chain the rebuild the code. Then you get your exclusive copyright advantages. And once you've left the market, or remove the product from the market, or the copyright has expired, the source code is made public domain.
So in this example shutting down the multiplayer servers would allow the escrow service to release the code to those who want to run multiplayer servers