EA Planning to Shut Down More Online Game Servers in April

If you happen to be a member of the gaming community who places a high value in unlocking all of the Achievements and Trophies in the games that you play, the following news is a mixture of good news / bad news -- the good news being that there is still time for you to unlock those illusive last few online Achievements or Trophies before EA pulls the plug on the game server -- while the bad news is that there is a long list of games that have already had their servers shut down, so if you did not get your unlocks in for those (see the list at the end of this article) you are SOL mates!

According to the official notice published by Electronic Arts on their website ". . . as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level -- fewer than 1% 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. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games."

It seems that they cannot say it any plainer than that -- but if you happen to have purchased an online pass to play those games though, that logic may not sound as reasonable to you... When you consider that some of the titles that they have pulled the plug on or are about to pull the plug on are less than three years old though, that gives reason to pause, eyebrow raised.

It has been alleged in online postings that part of the reasons given by EA for instituting their Online Pass system, which requires gamers who purchase their games second-hand or rent from services like GameFly to pay for a license to play onling, was that it was necessary to charge the fee in order to help cover the costs of maintaining those online servers -- servers that will no longer be online. That might pass the whiff-test for a game like FIFA 06, an older title that is clearly in need to retirement, but one of the games slated for shutdown is the EA Sports title MMA, which a quick check of our release schedules only hit gamer consoles on 19 October 2010 -- which according to our math is only 17 months ago?!