EA shutting down Mirror's Edge online services in January
Also shuttering Dragon Age: Origins' screenshot server
A few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s launch on PC. It’ll presumably affect the dystopian parkour game’s online leaderboards, and downloadable Ghosts of other players.
EA are also shutting down the multiplayer screenshot server for ageing RPG Dragon Age: Origins this Thursday, October 20th. You’ll still be able to play Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins offline, so no worries there. It’s only online components being trimmed away. EA say this is a necessary part of the lifecycle of their older games, where player numbers can fall to as low as “fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles”. That makes keeping online services running for those games “no longer feasible”, according to the publisher.
Other publishers do this too, of course, with Ubisoft receiving some flak earlier this year for deactivating online services for some of their older games. In that case, the shutdowns would have prevented players from accessing DLC they’d bought. Ubisoft later granted a reprieve of an extra month for the games, which included older Assassin’s Creeds, the original version of Far Cry 3, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Their services ended at the beginning of this month.
Mirror’s Edge is on Steam and the EA App for Windows for £18/$20/€20. You can read a full list of games published by EA that are marked for, or have already succumbed to, shutdown here.