EA Ends Overtime on 21 Titles

It’s always a sad day when the servers are shut down for a multiplayer game. When a publisher decides to finally pull the plug on a game, it can be a little disheartening to know you can never play that game online again. Of course, maintaining servers can be expensive so a publisher will always shut them down after the majority of players have moved on.

EA has posted on their website that they will shut down the servers for 21 PlayStation titles. On their website they state:

Despite some people’s perception, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these older 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. These decisions to retire games is 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. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.

They also go on to say that the servers being shut-down represent about 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles. Below is a list of games set to be shut-down on February 8th of 2011; a date which will live on in infamy.