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August 1st 2006 EA is dropping support of no less than 11 sportsgames
If you have invested into EA sports titles, challenge this:
starting August 1st, EA will drop online functionality on 11 games according to ArsTechnica. The list consists mainly of sportsgames like NBA Live 2005, NHL 2005 and FIFA Soccer 2005 – most of these titles are about 20 months old. But also games not even a year old have their internet functionality flushed down the drain – Total Club Manager’06 being a fine example of that. The decision affects pc, xbox and ps2 titles. EA makes an exception for the PS2 version of Need for Speed Underground 2, but PC and Xbox owners are left out in the cold.
On October 1st 2006 another batch of games will have their online functionality plugged: Madden NFL 2005 and NFL Street2:Unleashed. For a full list check out this page.
A message stating that online support for these games will be dropped August 1st had been on EA’s website for months but a lot of gamers have only now picked up on it and are outraged. EA has good reasons to quit online support for their ‘older’ games, how else would their saturation of the games market with barely improved name= “game old-yearofrelease+1year†remain profitable? Because of EA’s deal with the Sports associations hell will have to freeze over before third party game servers are possible.
Don’t like many of the EA games anyway - I have such a hard time keeping count... ;)
- Mark Vergeer's blog
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Comments
sports games are indeed seldom interesting....
I personally am not a big fan of sportsgames, but I do like the Need for Speed series. I don't thrive on sports statistics or rankings, but I can imagine a lot of people are. In the past I've only been involved with sports videogames when I actually played those sports myself - volleyball - and always was frustrated at how much better I was in real life.
-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-
As far as I know, the only
As far as I know, the only old Xbox 1 games with Live functionality that won't work on the Xbox 1 or Xbox 360 going forward (assuming it's emulated on the latter) are the EA games. Otherwise I don't think dropping support has been planned (though finding opponents on the oldest titles would certainly be an issue) from anything that I've read.
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
[ My collection ]
[ http://www.MythCore.com ]
Additional roster updates probably won't fly with EA....
EA has to make money by selling new games for every new season. Roster updates through micro transactions can only be possible if the company strikes other deals with the sports associations and at the same time completely break from a very successful business model. Nope sorry don't see it happen.
I wonder how M$ will keep up X360's support in the future? Old xbox Live accounts could be transitioned to the new platform so that is nice. Backwards compatibility of the X360 isn't great but it is slowly getting there. I truly hope more games will make it to the backwards list. Say does anybody have an old xbox game running on X360 with old Live capabilities that works?
-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-
The last data disc I can
The last data disc I can recall EA releasing was for one of the late '90's Madden's for the PlayStation 1. That was a very low key release and it was certainly long after such add-on updates were "expected" or in favor. Interestingly, many modern sports games have online hooks now where it's very easy to update the rosters throughout the season. Of course this functionality never translates beyond the end of the season (and you're lucky it works past the playoffs anyway).
I wonder if in the coming age of the micro transaction - we're seeing it now actually with Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 - it wouldn't actually make sense for these companies to allow buyers to get at least one more season out of their "old" games by making roster updates for the next year available for a small fee at certain points in the new season? Of course since making people buy completely "new" versions is so popular and so successful a business model (with Madden for instance selling millions of copies of the "new" version of the game every year), is there really that much incentive? After all, companies only do what they know they can get away with that generates the most revenue...
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
[ My collection ]
[ http://www.MythCore.com ]
I don't like sports games as
I don't like sports games as a whole (except for racing/combat ones), but the concept of the Total Club Manager games sounds interesting because I love sim/statistics games.
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=- Mat Tschirgi =- Armchair Arcade Editor
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