Hot on the heels of our active discussion about the continual upgrading of Windows required to stay up-to-date in PC games comes the details of EA's regularly scheduled shutdowns of some of their online services for their games.

As background information, the EA SPORTS™ games scheduled for shutdown in February and March 2011 represent roughly 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles. Despite some people's perception, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these older games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. These decisions to retire games is never easy.

The full list is now online, with most of the affected titles (EA Sports titles like FIFA 09, NCAA Football 09, NHL 09) targeted for termination on the 16th of February. If you believe their numbers then it makes some sense, but once again it's worth pointing out how gamers would benefit if developers created their online services using a more distributed, dedicated server-based model, as it would ensure these sorts of games would have a much longer lifespan online. Which is, of course, something that is most definitely not in their commercial interests.