EA Shuts Down Fan-Run Servers For Older Battlefield Games (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts. "We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."

EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown, which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games. To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago. It's the distribution of modified copies of these now-defunct games that seems to have drawn the ire of EA's legal department. Revive claimed over 900,000 registered accounts across its games, including nearly 175,000 players for the recently revived Battlefield Heroes.

Comments

Diehard?

[sexconker]

"As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."

More like die easy.

Re:Diehard?

[Gordo_1]

Well, what would you do? Continue to distribute modified copies of copyright software you don't have legal rights to? If EA wants to kill off its old online games, let em. Just pisses off 900,000 potential customers who'll now have one more reason to think twice about supporting them in the future.

Re:Diehard?

[Ichijo]

Just distribute binary diffs so people can patch their own copies of the game.

Re:Diehard?

[hackwrench]

Fight to eliminate intellectual property rights being the ones enforceable by law. For every right there is an equal and opposite right.

EA

[Anonymous Coward]

EAt shit and die.

Property is theft

[hackwrench]

Intellectual property especially, Good times were had and now EA is going to go ruin it, because "muy property."

Re:Property is theft

[hackwrench]

Didn't understand my post, fine. For every right there is an equal and opposite right. The fans just didn't fight for theirs.

Re:Property is theft

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still their property irregardless of company size.

EA is headquartered in the USA, thus your statement above is factually incorrect.

Copyright law does not impart *ownership* to the creators of any copyrighted work.
It only provides very specific and limited rights related to distribution and performance of the work to the copyright holder, which is all they can legally use copyright to limit.

In fact the only mention of the word "ownership" in copyright law is in the paragraph stating all works under copyright are the inheritance of the public to own, once the copyright term has expired.

If a small app developer finds his apps being used without his consent he/she also has the right to request that it to be stopped.

That is also factually incorrect. Consent is not required to *use* a copyrighted work.
Consent is required for distributing that work and for performing that work.
Consent is also required when a separate work is a derivative of another work that is copyrighted by someone else.

Simply *using* that work is not a restricted right under copyright law, and the copyright owners have no legal standing to claim otherwise.

In this one particular case, the legal issue is with distributing a work under copyright and held by EA.
Distributing a copyrighted work IS a right granted to the copyright holder.
Using a copyrighted work is not a right the copyright holder has any control over.

Re: Property is theft

[orlanz]

It would be nice if in the day of digitization, a distributed work becomes public domain if said distribution laps for more than 10 years. Distribution should include utility (i.e.: you can't charge $300 for something that you mass sold for $50, or turn off the validation server). It's really not hard nor expensive to provide a public copy for the term of the copyright.

If an owner can't keep providing his work for 10 years nor fund it for such, then it wasn't really worth much and they failed in the agreement with the public. The loss to the public was far greater than the gain to the owner.

  It would be more valuable being part of the public base that all can build upon.

Re: Property is theft

[QuantumFTL]

I like the general sentiment here, but I think there are a lot of details to iron out, and we would have to be careful regarding unintended consequences.

For instance, there's the matter of how to treat trade secrets, which are common in computer code. In many cases, the creator of a work doesn't even have a right to distribute source code that they've purchased a license to (say, a game engine) and have modified, so this is untenable unless you are willing to make entire business models completely flat.

I suspect on re-reading your comment that you mean the portion of a work that is distributed--in this case the game client. There are less issues with that, but still licensed assets are a fairly reasonable part of the copyrighted works market. Perhaps unlimited duplication after a lapse time would be allowed, but derivative works would not be?

It's an interesting thought. It's not going to happen, but something like it's now on my wishlist.

A lost opportunity

[techno-vampire]

If there are that many people who still want to play those games on line, EA should reactivate their own servers, let them play the game and charge a fair price for the service. Almost pure profit, as they should already have all of the infrastructure including the software.

Re:A lost opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

the "fair price" was already paid, ffs, through the retail price for the games. ea obsoletes titles based on age, not popularity. soon as a title is 'too old' and continued play cuts into new sales, they're shut down. ea would rather people buy new titles, ones sold via one-time-use keys, and use the abomination called origin to buy and play.

Re:A lost opportunity

[Somebody Is Using My]

But people playing old classics aren't playing - and buying - the new hotness... and more importantly, the new hotness' DLC, microtransactions and loot-boxes (that's where the real money is). And gamers have repeatedly shown that they will keep buying new games regardless of how poorly a publisher treats them. So there is absolutely no advantage to a publisher to keep old game servers running: it cannibalizes new sales, shutting them down doesn't dissuade new sales, and servers cost money.

Would releasing patches - which don't contain any copyrighted material - that can be applied to end-user's executables be a legal work-around? Although ensuring the correct version might be difficult; I am guessing these games went through a multitude of updates.

Re:A lost opportunity

[Dutch Gun]

EA is only interested in games that can extract maximum micro-transactions from players, probably in the form of in-game loot boxes. Look for this trend over the next few years from all EA-owned studios. In other words, even a single-player game is going to require some sort of massive grind (declared "optional"), like the new Mordor game (different publisher, but same damned mindset), or will have some sort of multi-player tacked on which support micro-transactions. I'm no longer expecting great single-player RPGs from Bioware - my assumption is that they'll be filled with this sort of crap, and I hope I can stand by my principles and not purchase it.

Screw this. Screw them. I weep for my own industry and the reluctance of publishers to consider simply making great games that people want to play, and instead spend all their efforts figuring out how to milk "cows", players who spend hundreds or even *thousands* of dollars on worthless in-game crap, all at the expense of people like me who are willing to pay for a great, one-time game experience.

Re:A lost opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Would releasing patches - which don't contain any copyrighted material

They'd be derivative works.

Re:A lost opportunity

[Insanity Defense]

The problem with this is that just because you may have liked the old game you may not like the new one and so won't buy it and may not buy the next one either because they took away the one you actually liked.

Right to repair

[PPH]

My game stopped working. I* fixed it. As should be my right.

*Or I had the mechanic of my choice perform the repair. For myself and all the other people who own this product.

Keep all this EA ass-hattery in mind as you purchase vehicles and other products. For which manufacturers maintain the right to not only withhold support, but remotely disable when they feel end of life has been reached. [This fulfills my obligatory bad car analogy quota for the week.]

Re:Alternatives to BF 2142? (no gore, fun action)

[damnbunni]

Splatoon.

It would be hard to get more fun and less realistic than Splatoon.

Of course, it's a vastly different style of 'shooter'.

No fan-run servers?

[marcle]

It might be hard to find a CPU and chipset that don't require air cooling. Maybe Peltier modules?

Makes me glad I stopped playing their games.

[HiThere]

I never trust a game that depends on somebody else's server being accessible. This is another piece of evidence as to why that is proper.

But "Electronic Arts", in particular, has several black marks against themselves in my book. Perhaps I just notice them more, but they seem worse than the average game maker.

Re:Alternatives to BF 2142? (no gore, fun action)

[damnbunni]

You play as a kid that turns into a squid and run around with splat guns or paint rollers or ink snipers or Gatling guns and the goal is actually to cover more of the arena in your team's color than the other team's, and you can shoot each other with the ink guns.

It's a very chaotic and offensive game; finding a defensable position is possible, but won't help cover territory.

Public random matches are short, but you can enter ranked play and team ranked play. (Neither of which I use, because I'm not very good at the game.)

Splatoon 1 is for the WiiU, Splatoon 2 is for the Switch. I don't know if many people are still playing the first one, though.

Re:Not that big of a loss

[antdude]

Not just that. Mod support like Desert Combat.

Re: Dear Electronic Arts:

[Shikaku]

https://i.imgur.com/nGFjzEs.pn...

And now this. I see a pretty harsh trend and it's not a one off. I think it's good to teach them what the company has a LONG history of doing.