EA is not known for caring about games that are more than a few months old and it regularly shuts down servers that support multiplayer on console and PC games. For the most part though, those games remain playable albeit in single-player form. That’s not the case for App Store games, however.
Anyone who paid $4.99 and purchased Rock Band for the iPhone recently got the message you see above. That’s right, this is a game that requires no server to play, and yet EA is for some undisclosed reason rendering it unplayable after May 31.If that wasn’t frustrating enough for anyone who still enjoys playing the game, you can still buy the app from the App Store. EA is apparently more than willing to accept your $5 for a game it knows will become useless in less than a month. And I hate to think how the person who purchased it yesterday and got this message today feels. I don’t think they’ll appreciate the, “Thanks for rocking out with us!” part.
My best guess as to why this is happening is that there’s some kind of music license involved. Typically EA would have to renew such a license to keep offering the game, and that cost has surely been compared to ongoing sales. If the cost is more than the income, then the game gets shutdown. If that is the case, then there’s no way EA will reverse the decision as it would cost them money for a game that is a couple of years old. That doesn’t explain why existing players are losing out too, though.
Whatever the case, this is totally unfair for anyone who paid $5 to purchase the app. Unless it was stated at time of purchase that the game would stop functioning on May 31, gamers have every right to be angry at EA for doing this.
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