Electronic Arts, who on their company's "vision" says that they "value being a generous company and community member", have brought about the demise of fan-run servers for some older, no longer supported Battlefield games. The games in question - Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes - had their multiplayer components shut down with the demise of GameSpy, and were being maintained by a fan coalition named Revive Network.

"We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team wrote. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations." Revive Network were distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure - and this seems to be the reaon why EA sought closure. "Please stop distributing copies of our game clients and using our trademarks, logos, and artwork on your sites," EA's counsel wrote. "Your websites may easily mislead visitors to believe that you are associated or affiliated with EA-we're the only ones that get to wear the 'Official EA' dog tag."It's one of those age-old facts: when servers for games that have a strong multiplayer experience - which may even be the games' focus - shut down, there's just no way players can actually play the game they paid for. This is an issue that has reared its head every now and then; sometimes, users themselves join up in crating fan-run servers that allow for those canned multiplayer experiences to thrive, letting users keep enjoying their spent money in ways that the companies themselves no longer see fit to support.

This time, like Blizzard has done before with World of Warcraft, EA has taken the stance of asking the managers of these unofficial servers to shut down their service. Revive Network started this revival process with Battlefield 2 in 2014, expanded its efforts to Battlefield 2142 last year, and had just created the server infrastructure for Battlefield Heroes a few months ago. Revive claimed over 900,000 registered accounts across its games, including nearly 175,000 players for the recently revived Battlefield Heroes.