List of Online Services EA Has Shut Down | Hacker News Reader

List of Online Services EA Has Shut Down

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125 pointssturadnidge81 comments

Note that most (if not all, as I only scanned the list) of these games do not depend on an online connection to play the game like Sim City V. They have an offline single-player component and it is the multiplayer functionality that has been shut down.

There are also a good amount of mobile/Facebook apps in the list.

If you are being critical of EA then the worst examples are games that were only released 2-3 years ago, such as many of the sports games like FIFA and Madden. Although these have had at least a couple of new iterations since then because of the yearly release schedule for their sports franchises. The majority of the player base tends to move over to the new version very promptly, much like the COD series.

On the whole this list looks far worse than it actually is. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable to shut down the multiplayer component of games that were released 8 years ago.

8 years ago? People can still play games such as Diablo II and Starcraft and those were released between some 15 years ago.

Well, the online multiplayer element anyway. I am not a PC gamer as such and so I have never played the games you mention, but even I know that there are no games in the list that are even moderately comparable to Diablo II and Starcraft in terms of longevity. Those two games are iconic PC titles with a huge fanbase/following even today.

While I have many complaints about Diablo III, I was never afraid of Blizzard shutting down the servers, and that definitely factored into my purchasing decision. As you note, they have been running the Diablo II and Starcraft servers for well over a decade.

I think the larger point is that when EA decides it is no longer profitable to pay for Sim City servers, the game (singleplayer experience and all) will simply cease to exist. There will be no searching through old boxes to find that install CD and take a trip down memory lane. There will be no reinstalling from Steam to show your friend this cool game mechanic. The game will die a full and permanent death, the equivalent of which would be a self-destruct timer on your physical game disc. This list is a list of games that EA has already decided to kill the multiplayer capacity, but I think the point the OP was trying to make was "What if all of these games had the same DRM Sim City does today?", they wouldn't just be a lessened gaming experience because no multiplayer, they would be gone forever.

We have the expectation with an MMO (where we pay a monthly fee to keep playing in an online persistent world) that it won't last forever, but Sim City has traditionally been a single player game. There are ostensibly reasons to have an online component for the new Sim City that is outside of the realm of DRM, but if you think about it, those reasons (players control other cities in your region) could easily be duplicated with simple AI or local multiplayer. Instead of going that route, EA decided that this game would live as long as it decided it was profitable and no longer.

I took away a different message from that post. The games referenced all have multiplayer components, but did not require the game servers to play single player. It's an 'apples and oranges' kind of situation. Especially as, if EA were to shut down the Simcity servers, it would have to stop selling the game. If the multiplayer is only a part of the games revenue, it's easier to shut down.

So there's a weird gap. I can still pay games I bought in the 90s... but apparently EA games I bought >5 years ago I can no longer play...

Yep. And most likely you wont be able to play SimCity 5 in 5 years time.

Can we not obsess about this like reddit is doing? This is entirely tangential to the purpose of this site. One article about this is more than enough.

I'm curious what you've decided the purpose of this site is. This seems like a huge issue to discuss around the future of software and the concept of "abandonware", as well as a cautionary tale about DRM, scaling, and failing to plan for success. All sounds about right to me for this site.

It is an important issue, and that's why we have the other thread.

I too believe it's an important issue. One that will hopefully spur enthusiasm of a few to come up with solutions.

When you say tangential, I assume you mean orthogonal?

I think it's a fairly poignant example of what happens when SaaS fails, and what it means when you have a SaaS business offering.

I'm genuinely curious as to why you think having two separate but related threads on a forum is of any consequence. It seems that every other minute someone here dramatizes these submissions, as if having a line of text in the feed that you're not personally interested in is somehow akin to the tragedies of rape and murder (hyperbole intended).

I assure you, the people constantly complaining about every submission is far more annoying than the occasional (subjectively) extraneous submission.

I guess I'm tooting my own horn now, but one of the original design choices for my game was to allow player-hosted servers. I don't want my game to die when I stop supporting it.

Matchmaking is centralized, but the game can be configured for third party matchmaking servers.

If it was good enough for 90s games, it's good enough for today's games.

I've always thought a nice matchmaker that was OS would be nice to have for all of that kind of thing. Also nice game, voted for it on steam for you.

And this is what's wrong with always-on DRM. A sad state of gaming we are in now. In 20 years, we will look back at the games from the 80s and 90s, then see a wide empty gap from an era where almost all new games required vendor support and are therefore unplayable anymore.

I should point out that a lot of those on that list are original xbox games, which all would have been shut down on MS's end when they shut off the original Xbox Live. See http://kotaku.com/5535672/the-last-man-to-play-halo-2-on-xbo....

Madden 11? Meaning, a game that came out 2 years ago is no longer playable?

In terms of online multiplayer, yeah.

Most people that play Madden games move yearly to the new releases. The servers that support the old games probably drain fast and are unneeded after some predictable period of time. Whether or not server shutdown behavior encourages this yearly migration is another issue.

Most people, not all people. Pretty tough on those who forked out and wanted to keep playing online.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but at the end of the day EA has the exact numbers of how many players move from one game to the next, and are making business decisions with that in mind.

They don't really give you a choice, do they? Wouldn't it be in their interest to drop support after two years, even if 25% of people were still playing to push them to buy a new copy?

Not disagreeing with you either, in fact my first instinct was to downvote your previous post but I realised it was EA's behaviour I disapproved of rather than you discussing it.

My issue is that someone spending their hard-earned on a game doesn't get a major warning on the box that their online play will drop away within a couple of years. It's small print, below the small print, that says "EA MAY RETIRE ONLINE FEATURES AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON WWW.EA.COM."

I think game buyers are right to be very nervous when so much of a new gaming experience is reliant on a company that shuts down a product when there's not enough money left to be made or their priorities lie elsewhere.

Not everyone can justify annual upgrades of their sports games or their consoles, etc. Or perhaps they just don't like new features or styles - e.g., I like FIFA 2002 more than recent iterations.

Yet, many still play Tecmo Bowl (as do I).

http://tecmobowl.org/

If they are going to shut down a server for a game, why not release that 1 final patch that will either let people run their own server, or make it so it's no longer dependent on a server?

If that happened why would you buy the new games that the servers were shut down to make way for?

Naive answer: because they make better, newer games ?

This is EA we are talking about. Each new release is just as likely to completely fuck up the core gameplay mechanics as it is to marginally improve them.

Actually, now that Bobby Kotick has completely destroyed everything that Blizzard stood for, you can say it about pretty much every large game development company other than Valve Software.

If the only reason people are playing the new game is because the old one shut down, then you're not really releasing a new game; you're renewing their subscription. You should either realize that this is evil and innovate, or realize that this is inefficient and bake it in.

For the roster updates and game "improvements."

Indeed. But look at from EA's perspective. They already have your money, why do they care?

Because you may be pissed off enough to shun their current offerings? I refuse to buy anything from Ubisoft after the debacle that was Silent Hunter V - partially because their always-on DRM didn't always work and left me unable to play my single-player game, and partly because the game itself was so bug-ridden there was no point anyway.

Ubi's obsession with piracy (the CEO famously claims only 5-7% of games are paid for) and their lack of attention to the part I'm actually interested in, the game, has probably cost them a few hundred bucks by now.

Of course, but those are more diffuse and long-term issues, which EA finds it convenient to ignore right now. Just as all companies which burn their user base in service to short-term profits do.

Because it's not always the case of just one minor patch. You have to figure that a lot of these games have fairly complicated backend architectures. You could be talking multiple different services, all with different configuration requirements.

There's a big difference between designing a server so the public can running it, and designing a server for internal use only.

If they can't fix their own software to work without their own servers then they are lazy at best and incompetent at worst. There are no valid excuses in claiming a fix is too difficult when you're the one who designed the problem to begin with.

Every single 11 series game being gone is inexcusable. I have friends who own TW11, Madden11, NHL11, FIFA 11 and everything is just dead now. I understand they have to take things offline at some point, but for the amount of money they made this is just shocking.

Not really. Sports games have insanely high turnaround times. People go to the next version really quickly to get the newest rosters and engines.

They look at player data and make a decision that it's no longer profitable to keep the servers up.

I thought the point of "the cloud" is companies can relatively easily serve "the long tail" of consumers?

Not for game servers. We're talking about full applications that have to run somewhere, written years ago, by people that may not be at the company. Each additional game they have to support as a 24/7/365 service incurs some support costs that don't necessarily decrease over time, or with the active number of players.

Ideally once the game is shut down, the server becomes free or open source for users.

...and then a fun game becomes a deterrent to buying the newest games. Of course, if the game is still fun, why not just keep the servers running and keep making money in subscription fees? What is the point of demanding that people pay for a new game when you can just charge them for old games?

most of those games are not sub games. they are just matchmaking and DRM.

What if the code in the game server contains non-GPL/free libraries? What if it includes bindings to proprietary services and sensitive data? How much time should EA devote to repackaging game server code for open source release, knowing that it will barely get any use and could only result in less sales in the future?

I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work. Simcity is just authentication and saves, most games are even less than that. Heck, Battle.net is just a modified IRC server.

It would avoid a lot of the poop storm EA is facing with this. It's presumably costing them millions, and it's something they could have predicted when the beta crapped out.

You're typically talking:

* Matchmaking

* Authentication

* Stats

* Chat

Things have come a long way since Battle.NET, you're really not going to find that backend servers for any modern game are a simple thing.

Hell, any game that makes use of GFWL is going to be heavily dependent on the GFWL SDK. You can't release that, as it's under a fairly strick NDA. The same with any SteamWorks game.

> I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work.

It's always easier spec'ing the amount of time something takes when you have no idea what goes into doing it and its not your job anyway.

While the SimCity servers handle those functions, apparently large portions of the economic and simulation calculations for regional activity in the game (i.e. what happens between cities) occurs on the server and would also need implementation and support.

> I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work.

Then it shouldn't take you more than a week to emulate it from scratch, right?

Nope, because then that would eat into EA's profits for [insert brand new title here]. That's just business sense!

They could serve you for very little cost. But what if they believe that turning off the old games will likely get you to pay full price for a new game?

Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.

However, harming your brand is far more damaging than a short term gain. New customers are far more expensive than repeat customers, and a previously angered customer is even more expensive. In the long term, value as perceived by customers gives companies more pricing freedom, and as long as there are competitors that do not collude, attempts to create scarcity ultimately will be counter productive.

>Planned obsolescence, and the idea that it is strategical to design something like a car to wear out in a few years is popularly believed to be clever and widely practiced.

"Planned obsolescence" is a grossly misunderstood and misused term. It's not a nefarious scheme to get you to buy more stuff. The term has meant a few different things over the years, but that isn't one of them.

It's a popular mis-use of the term to mean they're designing your car to break down so you have to buy a new one. Companies are smart enough to know the value of reputation.

The popular misconception is relevant to its efficacy, but I think the operational meaning of the term is generally well understood. There is a linguistics discussion to be had about prescriptivism and descriptivism as to whether it refers only to iterative increases in quality, or also intentional reliability.

To see the historical use of the term, I encourage you to glance at some of the literature[1] — especially in auto industry contexts.

[1]http://www.google.com/search?q=%22planned+obsolescence%22...

You didn't really put a link to a Google search in there, did you?

Sure, but to http://books.google.com, though the front of the link doesn't make it obvious. You can alter it to focus on a specific time frame if you choose, or add a term about automobiles.

As you pointed out, the concept of intentional unreliability over time is like an anti-pattern for business, yet it is one encompassed by the term "planned obsolescence".

I'm sorry, but there are plenty of companies that have made great businesses out of producing less-reliable products.

If I buy a thing - almost any thing - from Walmart, I know that quality of that thing is not the first priority. A hammer from Walmart - theoretically a kind of good that can last forever - is going to be made from worse steel, the grip is going to fall off with heavy use, the wooden handle will splinter, it's going to rust. It will not last as long as a hammer purchased from Home Depot. On the other hand, it will be cheaper. Walmart is making a perfectly good business off of selling such goods.

Walmart chooses to stock lesser quality goods. We accept that as a legitimate business model. But Walmart doesn't come to my house and worsen the goods later on - they don't come and spray the hammer with salt-water to encourage me to get a new one. Digital goods don't fall apart on their own, so companies like EA which want to sell inferior goods have to take affirmative action to make them fall apart ("hey, let's link all our goods to a server, and turn the server off a few months after the good comes out"), and this doesn't sit well with us in our perceptions.

What are you sorry about?

Only if you're misusing the term. As popularized by Stevens in 1954 it just means the car companies are going to use styling to get you to buy a new car before the old one wears out.

The above is a cache link because ea.com is returning 500's, I assume as part of the Sim City debacle. The actual URL is here: http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates

Just to clarify, I assume that for some of these games the actual multiplayer game hosting is not done by EA and follows a P2P model or allows the use of third party dedicated server (e.g counterstrike)?

So it's just the match making servers that are shut down?

If it's just matchmaking then perhaps a third party can support all matchmaking for abandoned games, Steam seems to do something like this with it's built in matchmaking.

For example it's still (last I checked) possible to play the original Unreal Tournament online.

This is my big concern with the new SimCity. If I pay $60 for SimCity, I want it to stick around more than 2 years, heck last time I booted my 486 I got simcity 2000 playing again. A little more real-world, I still occasionally play the original Starcraft. The argument against these always on games is that they _could_ do such things, then add to it that EA _does_ such things...

Should also include Rupture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_(social_networking) :(

Oh, and I Play Wow too: http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/01/16/i-play-wow-facebook-app-re...

Not quite. Rupture eventually became Origin.

It didn't. Origin was built by a different team within EA after Rupture was laid off. I was the engineering manager at EA for the Rupture team.

I'm sure that list of sports titles will grow every year which is rather unsettling. Especially considering EA has an exclusive license with most of the sports leagues so other publishers can't even compete in the area.

I originally wanted to buy new SimCity but thank good ness I didn't. It wasn't until now that I see how chock full of 'DRM' it has.

Someone should kickstart(er) a SimCity 'like' game the way it was _meant_ to be.

Yup, that's already happening.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-...

NO! Not MVP 07 NCAA Baseball for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Tried to play BF2: BC yesterday, sure enough Origin was getting pounded. I'm not a huge gamer so it's not a big deal for me to say so, but I won't buy an EA game again.

I feel like it's more important that casual gamers are noticing and reacting to this. They don't listen to us xcore ones!

The only EA game I bought in the past decade was Worms for android. Never was able to run it ever. The entire experience was a pie in the face.

I will never buy from them again.

This might help you: http://blog.nofate.me/?p=35

I've never tried it myself though because I don't own any games on Origin.

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