EA shuts down servers for 12 games

EA closes online servers for Madden, FIFA, NBA Jam and NBA Live

Electronic Arts has announced it plans to shut down the online servers for twelve of its videogames, effectively 'retiring' those titles.

EA plans to shut down online services for twelve of its games by the end of January. The publisher made the announcement on its official website.

"The decisions to retire older EA games are 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," EA said in a statement on its website. "But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles - where it's no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running."

The games affected are as follows:

January 3, 2013: FIFA Manager 11 for PC

January 11, 2013: FIFA 11 for PC, PS3, Wii & Xbox 360, FIFA 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360, Madden NFL 11 for PS3, Wii & Xbox 360, Madden NFL 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360, NBA JAM for PS3 & Xbox 360, NBA LIVE 10 for PS3 & Xbox 360, NCAA Football 11 for PS3 & Xbox 360, NHL 11 for PS3 & Xbox 360 and NHL 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360

January 14, 2013: The Sims 2 for PC/MAC and TheSims2.com

January 19, 2013: Trenches II for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch





Nick Cowen

Nick Cowen studied Classical Civilisations and English at the University of Witwatersrand and joined T3 as Editor at Large, writing about subjects including video games, gaming hardware, gadgets and consoles. You'll also find plenty of content by Nick on T3.com about video game industry events and shows.