As stated in the title, EA has announced in this update that 12 more games will be losing their online services with FIFA Manager 11 being the first to go on Thursday. In the same update, EA makes this statement:
The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy. The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired. But 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. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.
Let’s just hope that these extra resources will be used wisely. In the meantime, it’d be best to get your fill of these games’ online features before it’s too late!
The full schedule of expected shutdowns is displayed below.
January 3: FIFA Manager 11 (PC)
January 11: FIFA Soccer 11 (PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360), FIFA Soccer 11 Ultimate Team (PS3, Xbox 360), Madden NFL 11 (PS3, Wii, Xbox 360), Madden NFL 11 Ultimate Team (Xbox 360, PS3), NBA Jam (Xbox 360, PS3), NBA Live 10 (PS3, Xbox 360), NCAA Football 11 (Xbox 360, PS3), NHL 11 (PS3, Xbox 360), NHL Ultimate Team (PS3, Xbox 360)
January 14: The Sims 2 (PC, Mac, TheSims2.com)
January 19: Trenches II (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch)
