EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games 329
Last month Gamespy announced it would be shutting down at the end of May. Many game makers relied upon Gamespy for all of the multiplayer and online services related to their games, and there was a scramble to transition those games away from Gamespy. Now, Electronic Arts has decided it's not worth the trouble for older titles. They're terminating online support for a huge number of games. The game list includes: Battlefield 2, Crysis 1 & 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, and Star Wars: Battlefront 1 & 2. EA said, "As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent 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."
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that play has dwindled to almost nothings. Some hugely popular games like JKA have fewer than a dozen players on at any one time over dozens of servers sitting almost empty, but fun times are still had. One the other hand, there are still a lot of people playing Tribes and Tribes 2 mods, so community support for some games could be quite large. I would think it would be that way for Battlefield 2.
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where I see a niche market. A company that provides multiplayer access for legacy games... stuff like older C&C games, NWN, and many other games that are still playable, but may not be worth it financially to keep the servers up.
Given the choice, I'd go with a paid subscription model because one is paying for the servers, not the game, so the multiplayer access is for all the games. One could also add stuff like the NWN/NWN2 vault for easy download of player-made content as well as FPS maps/scripts.
However, I don't know if a sub model is viable, so what might work is getting newer indy games to use it, perhaps adding a couple dollars to the price of the game in order for it to use the multiplayer functionality for a couple years.
Maybe this might be something for gog.com to make? GogNet anyone?
Re:Lol... (Score:2, Interesting)
short bus
If anybody wants to throw money at purchasing shortbus.org and repointing it at Slashdot, I'm in.
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this might be something for gog.com to make? GogNet anyone?
That's quite cool idea, actually.
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking they should be on the hook for supporting them for 95 years: the length of their copyright terms.