One of the often overlooked drawbacks to sporting games moving so much of their functionality into online modes is the effect this has on gamers who prefer to stick to older sports games for their gaming needs. For players who don’t need to have the latest roster updates to enjoy their sports games, buying games that are a few years out of date can be an excellent way to play sports games on the cheap, with resale options often allowing you to pick up games for just a few dollars once they’ve had a couple sequels.
Unfortunately, as more and more of the content in those games moves online, that makes those older editions more and more reliant on connecting to official servers, which means those games are subject to becoming mostly, or even fully, unplayable when servers are shut down. This leaves gamers at the whim of developers and how long they decide to keep online functionality available to their older games. For fans of four popular EA franchises, a new batch of server shutdowns is on deck for October.
Games which have already had their servers shutdown this month, or will have their servers shutdown in the months ahead, include:
- NHL 21 (Xbox One, Playstation 4): Not available on the latest generation of console, gamers still playing this hockey game can no longer access online features as of October 6.
- NEED FOR SPEED: RIVALS (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, EA App, Steam): Among the more popular arcade-style racing series in gaming history, Need For Speed lost online play for this edition on October 7.
- Madden NFL 22 (Xbox One, Xbox S|X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, EA App, Steam): Now with four successors, the Madden release from 2021 will be losing server functionality on October 20.
- FIFA 23 (Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5): The final server termination for a sports game this month comes on October 30, and it’s a particularly notable one as it officially marks the end of functionality for FIFA games. With the series abandoning the license and transferring over to EA FC the next year, this marked the final game under its iconic original branding.
You can find the full list of planned server termination dates from EA, broken down into A-H, I-Q, and R-Z, on the EA website. While it’s not surprising to learn about more server cancellations, both for the understanding reason of resource allocation and the more cynical one of companies wanting to prioritize their current releases, which still make them money when you buy them, it’s still unfortunate to know more games will be losing functionality this month. Older sports games have long been among the best discount buys in gaming, but they become less so as this grows more common.
