EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely

Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"

Comments

I know this is EA and not Blizzard,

[pecosdave]

but my buddy who is still semi-involved in the BNET-D legal debacle can use this type of thing in that court case.

I for one think the whole company run server idea is a good one, but I think they should release code for every game as well for this very reason. Custom servers were half the fun of old Unreal Tournament games, and I know a lot of people who are into custom Enemy Territory servers.

Remember, the reason BNET-D started to begin with is Bizzards servers sucked back in the day, as far as I'm concerned this sort of bull shit justifies that sort of thing.

Why the need to shut down anything

[DrXym]

Surely it is not beyond the resources of EA to buy a server farm and run virtualized instances of game servers on demand. If a game becomes less popular, the VMs timeout and shutdown. If it's very popular more instances get spawned. I don't see any reason that they have to physically decommission or repurpose anything in this day & age.

Re:Some thoughts

[DarkOx]

Its a short sited probably ultimately self defeating goal. I was listening to PBS business report just last night and they were interviewing some economics professors who were discussing how the move to always maximize share holder value has not actually lead to better share holder returns over the longer time period of the past two decades.

They also pointed out one company P&G pretty well stayed on the build new business and protect the customers perception of value, noting that it outperformed the market over those two decades. Now obviously you'd need to go through alot more data to reach sound conclusions.

I do think there is enough evidence out there that a longer term view eventually yeilds better returns. We should try and break the 18mo CEO cycle.