Electronic Arts recently announced that they will be discontinuing online services for more than 10 older games, including Dragon Age: Origins and Mirror’s Edge. Both games have managed to maintain a community of players despite being more than 10 years old (Dragon Age: Origins was released on November 3, 2009, and Mirror’s Edge was released on November 11, 2008).
“The decision to withdraw specific features or modes from certain games or discontinue online services related to older games is never easy,” the publisher said. The development team and operations staff always pour their heart and soul into the games, their features and modes to the extent that they can rival the number of players. It’s difficult to have to close one of the above. As these games were replaced by newer titles, the number of people playing the older games dropped an order of magnitude, to less than 1% of the online player peak of all EA games. Therefore, we find it no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved in maintaining and running online services for legacy games.”
Online services for older games will be scaled back or shut down completely. Below is the support discontinuation timeline for some prominent games:
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel
Dragon Age: Origins (Sever Multiplayer Screenshots)
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
Onrush
Mirror’s Edge
NBA Jam: On Fire Edition
Gatling Gears
Shanks 2
Readers can see the full list here.
