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Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

Richard Burns Rally is still played today. Unfortunately due to Codemaster's requirement for RaceNet, Dirt Rally 2.0 will not see the same longevity. CM should remove this requirement before the EA acquisition. EA has a long history of shutting down online services required to play games.

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Actually, EA doesn't always kill games it shuts servers for. In fact, it gave the rights to online hosting of its entire back catalog of games to the amazing Aussie Scott Kevill, who runs GameRanger. You can play games as far back as Dungeon Keeper 2, or as recent as some of the new Battlefields on GameRanger, completely for free. It supports almost 1000 old PC games, and allows you to play online in games that only supported LAN play at launch. Command and Conquer, Medal of Honor, tons of others: https://www.gameranger.com/games/

EA made an announcement about this but didn't make a big deal about it: https://answers.ea.com/t5/C-C-The-Ultimate-Collection/Info-G...

I hate companies that kill online servers for games, and have dedicated a large portion of my life to bringing these games back, but EA hasn't really caused this type of situation in a while, thanks to GameRanger. There's plenty to dislike about EA, but killing online servers is something they actually handle better than most other PC game companies: everything is on GameRanger.

The decisions to withdraw particular features or modes of certain EA games, or to retire online services relating to older EA games are never easy. The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into our games, their features and modes almost as much as the players, and it is hard to see one retired. As games are replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the games that have been live for some time dwindles to a level – typically 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 the online services for these games up and running. [1]

[1] https://www.ea.com/service-updates

Games impacted by the above policy:

https://www.ea.com/service-updates/a-h

https://www.ea.com/service-updates/i-q

https://www.ea.com/service-updates/r-z

Certainly not all of those, but a fair number of those are supported on GameRanger. Battlefield 2, for example. They do still kill games, no denying that, and their track record with MMO's is terrible, but comparing the number of old EA games you can still play on GameRanger with the back catalog of a publisher like Ubisoft, EA has WAAAAY more old games still playable online with GameRanger.

Again, it's not a complete solution, butit seriously supports the vast majority of popular old EA games. Yeah, it doesn't support Monopoly for Wii... but for PC games it's the tits.

I don't think it is a stretch to assume that GameRanger will never add RaceNet server emulation.

> Richard Burns Rally is still played today.

Yes, thanks to a small community of volunteers (to whom I am very grateful) maintaining it with patches you need to download from a forum website.

If you install it from original install media to a Windows 10 box, it won't even launch without the 3rd party patches.

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