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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?"
...are the idiots who bought the terrible EA games in the first place. I, for one, have no pity.
the option for customers to run dedicated servers are better. ...
but seriously, who plays Madden anyway?
I, for one, have a whole bunch of schadenfreude. EA is well known for shafting its customers. If you buy their games you deserve nothing less.
BNET-D started because several individuals had banned CD-Keys or wished to play with pirated versions of Blizzards games. While BNET-D had many potential uses most of them were to circumvent the law.
Remember that the goal of any company including EA is not to make games, but to make money. They calculate they'll make more money by forcing people off the old games (at least the online parts) with the hope that some or most of those people will then upgrade to the newest version of the franchise:
Other posters have expressed the hope that they'll release source code to the old games so that community-run versions of the servers can be developed. I submit that EA has a greater monetary incentive to keep the source closed - they can save a ton of money on development costs by slapping a new logo on last year's game, changing the version string, updating the player names, and releasing it again next year.
(soapbox alert) So why even play these games at all? What do you get after an hour of playing video games, besides a headache and high blood pressure? Why not go play an instrument, or play sports for real, or do something to improve yourself or the rest of the human race?
Take it one step further, let's actively fuck with them. Encourage piracy, hand out EA games for free. Insist everyone with pirated EA games that go online, leave em online as much as possible eating up bw, even if it's small. Gamers are as a bad as druggies- boycott is just not an option. This is the next best thing.
And.. what would Blizzard have gotten out that equation? Other than willingly bending over to the next random Joe off the street and giving up piece of control to a software base they spent millions on development.
Asking for something with nothing in exchange gets you no where. It's indicative of a whiny, self-centered mindset that expects (more accurately demands) items, access to other items, attention, and respect for nothing.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Never said it was right. What I did say is that they deserve that which resulted from their lack of foresight/planning.
Just because it isn't right doesn't mean that they didn't deserve it. You get what you deserve and you deserve what you get. Why? Because you made the choices that put you in that situation.
The roster of 4-player / console games seems to be getting thin. I guess they don't drive console sales enough...
The advantage of a console used to be that consoles are typically connected to a bigger monitor than PCs, so that you could invite friends over without having to dismantle multiple PCs. But without party games like Smash Bros., what is the big advantage of a console over a PC?
If you're using an algorithm, rather than discrete, non-sequential random numbers stored in a database, for your CD keys, you deserve to have them cracked.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs