EA Shutting Down Servers of 2 Games in 24 Hours

Electronic Arts, aka EA, is shutting down servers of 2 games in roughly the next 24 hours, leaving a large portion of said games unplayable. There is offline, single-player content, but multiplayer is a big offering of both games. Thankfully, both games are older games in annualized series, so the vast majority of owners of said games have moved on to newer installments, but this isn’t the case for everyone, especially in emerging markets.

For these people, it’s important to make note that come September 1, the servers of two EA games — NHL 22 and NHL 23 — will cease to operate, taking with them each game’s entire multiplayer functionality. Electronic Arts does not divulge a reason as to why it is pulling the plug on the servers of the pair of games, but the reason is fairly obvious: the cost of maintaining them outweighs the benefit. It likely far outweighs the benefit, and has for a while, because keeping servers up and protecting them from hackers looking to use your game as a backdoor entrance into a larger service — like PSN — is not cheap. And the pool of players for this pair of games has been greatly diminished for a while, but EA has a standard protocol with a standard length it adheres to for all its sports games, and it’s better than most competitors in the annualized sports space.

Two Games Lost to Time

It’s crazy to think games from 2021 and 2022 are already lost to time, but that’s how it works with annualized sports series, especially in the modern era. Every once in a while an installment will stick out from the rest, and cement a nostalgic legacy as a result, but this happened more in the past, and is less common now. Now, the games blend together due to rapidly diminishing advancements in tech and homogenized pipelines.

NHL 22 was released in 2021 by EA Vancouver for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Upon release, it earned a Metacritic score of 71. NHL 23 followed the following year on the same platforms to an identical score of 71. This is by and large because the two games are basically the same game. And these scores are way off the highs of the series, which came in two eras: the early 2000s and early 2010s. Since then, it’s been all downhill.

While some EA games that are only a few years old are shutting down, others that are much older are actually getting updates. To this end, earlier this month, a great 2008 EA game got a major update, 18 years after its release.

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