Fifty EA classics will soon no longer be playable online

EA announced Monday that it will stop offering online features for 50 of its games. The reason for this is that the Gamespy master servers will go offline at the end of May. The list of games includes Crysis 2 and a number of Battlefield games.

Games such as Bulletstorm for the PlayStation 3 and Command & Conquer 3 for the PC are also on the list. Games on the list will lose all of their online features from June 30. Also, the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of Star Wars: Battlefront II and the MySims series for various Nintendo platforms will no longer be playable online after June 30. EA explains that before compiling the list, it looked at the number of gamers still playing the game online. The players of the games on the list would make up less than 1 percent of the total number of online players of all EA games per game.

At the beginning of April, EA still let know that at least it was working to keep Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142 playable online; now it appears that only Bad Company 2 will retain its online features after the end of June. The company says it is still looking for a way to keep online multiplayer available for some of the affected games. One of the possibilities it mentions is to let players of the game host servers themselves.

GameSpy announced in early April that its master servers, which mainly provide lobbies, matchmaking and leaderboards, will go offline on May 31. Many older games in particular used the servers. The servers of some games will be migrated to Steamworks, GameRanger or similar services.