They get a lot of flack for seemingly supporting anti-consumer measures, such as always-on DRM, releasing broking games to retailers or locking content on a disc that you already paid for. However, despite all the perceived evil that a company like Electronic Arts does in the eyes of the general gaming public, they still enact some sense of moral obligation to do the right thing... sometimes.
IGN is reporting that Electronic Arts is actually looking into saving the Battlefield games that run on the GameSpy services.
According to an official that IGN reached out to, regarding clarification on a Tweet EA had previously sent out...
"We're working on finding a transition, but still have technical hurdles to overcome. We will make an announcement when there is news to share."
This is actually good news that EA is even looking into the situation. Originally, EA's Twitter response indicated that they were doing so for the sake of the gaming community, with the Tweet reading...
How soon EA will take measures to get Battlefield out of the hands of GameSpy is completely unknown. However, for those of you a bit out of the loop, GameSpy's multiplayer services are being shutdown starting May 31st. Just a day after Mario Kart 8 releases.
The owner of GameSpy, Glu, won't have any exceptions for games under the services, and any game whose multiplayer services are routed through GameSpy's infrastructure will cease to operate, as noted in the official announcement on the GameSpy website...
“Important notice: effective May 31, 2014, Gamespy will cease providing all hosted services for all games.”This is going to affect multiplayer in our games that use Gamespy for matchmaking, cd keys authentification and NAT traversal from Arma: Resistance to Arma 3. We are planning to introduce an alternative solution using Steam to Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead and Arma 3 users.”
A complete list of the games that will definitely be affected by the shutdown was rolled out by Blues News. You can check out the games below.
Arma (Source)
Arma: Cold War Assault (Source)
Arma 2 (Source)
Arma 2: Free (Source)
Borderlands
Dungeon Defenders [PS3/Non-Steam] (Source)
Halo: Combat Evolved
Saints Row 2 (Source)
Star Wars Battlefront
Star Wars Battlefront 2
Stronghold 2 (Source)
Stronghold Legends (Source)
Take On Helicopters (Source)
For the complete list of every game that has some sort of online service attachment to the GameSpy network services, you can check out the long roll out over on this very helpful Reddit thread.
At least EA has come forward about rectifying the situation that they didn't even create. That's very good on them.
Sadly, not every publisher is as benevolent when it comes to saving their games from server-shutdowns, such as Rockstar and Capcom, both of which, so far, have not said what they plan to do with their games when the more nefarious Games For Windows Live shuts down on July 1st.
In this very rare case, we can actually say “Good guy, EA”. You've earned some brownie points on this one... for now.
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