EA are blowing the final whistle (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) on online play for a pretty big chunk of their Football titles.
The service shutdown on the 8th of February will affect the following games:
- FIFA 07 for Xbox 360
- FIFA 08 for PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii
- FIFA 09 for PC, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii
- FIFA 09 Ultimate Team for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
- FIFA Street 3 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
- EA SPORTS™ FIFA Manager 10 for PC
- 2010 FIFA World Cup™ for PlayStation Portable and Wii
- 2010 FIFA World Cup™ Demo for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
- UEFA EURO 2008™ for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
On their Service Updates page EA list the closures as accounting for a tiny percentage of online traffic to their servers.
The EA SPORTS™ games scheduled for shutdown in February 2011 represent roughly 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles. 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.
There hasn’t been a lot of notice given, so if you’re still playing those games online or have any outstanding Achievements/Trophies you want to mop up, you had better make the most of the next month.
