If you happen to be a fan of multiplayer action in Crysis 3, Dead Space 2, Dante's Inferno, or Mirror's Edge Catalyst, you're going to want to start squeezing in what you can, while you can, because Electronic Arts will be pulling the plug on all of them later this year.
The looming closures, first spotted by Pure Xbox, come as part of EA's semi-regular housecleaning process for older games. "As games are replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the games that have been live for some time dwindles to a level—typically fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles—where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping the online services for these games up and running," EA's Online Service Shutdown page explains.
"We are also committed to constantly updating and improving the features and modes to keep in our games to ensure they remain exciting to play for as long as possible. That commitment to great gameplay sometimes means that we need to remove outdated features and modes."
The elimination of online servers doesn't necessarily mean the end of a particular game, as singleplayer modes will typically remain accessible. When EA announced the closures of a handful of older Battlefield games earlier this year, for instance, it also said they'd be removed from sale, because without multiplayer there really wasn't to be done with them. There's been no formal announcement on the status of this new batch of games (aside from the shutdown dates) but it's reasonable to assume that the singleplayer campaigns will remain accessible, and thus the games will remain available for purchase.
It's worth noting that Battlefield Bad Company 2, one of the Battlefield games recently slated for shutdown, also has a singleplayer campaign and it was removed from sale anyway, which doesn't fit well with my theory. But these four games really are more overtly singleplayer experiences: When Crytek released Crysis 3 Remastered in 2022, for instance, it didn't even bother including multiplayer functionality. I've reached out to EA for more information on their in-store status and will update if I receive a reply—in the meantime, if you're a big fan of Dante's Inferno co-op, jump in and enjoy it while you can.
