Sometimes they're even malicious about it. Dice/EA's Battlefield 2142 (2006) was one of my favorite games on PC as a teenager. It's still fun - many of the gam

Sometimes they're even malicious about it. Dice/EA's Battlefield 2142 (2006) was one of my favorite games on PC as a teenager. It's still fun - many of the game mechanics and game modes have not been replicated in any Battlefield title since. For some background - Battlefield is a mostly multiplayer game, only a few have had anything approaching a campaign and it always feels like an afterthought. Progression in BF 2142 is tied to you having an online account, whether you're playing a LAN game or not. Obviously today's landscape is way worse than even that, but it was something that felt egregious at the time. The game even came with a dedicated server binary so you could self-host game servers. However, it had to communicate with EA servers to check progression data of people joining the game and such. When EA shut it down, they took out both the matchmaking AND the progression service - meaning self-hosted servers and LAN matches were taken out as well. Some people reverse engineered the progression service for what was essentially a decade old title at that point, and EA brought the hammer down on them. Let me remind you that you still needed a valid key for the game, this wasn't a crack to get a free copy, it only replaced the progression server so that LAN and self-host (official binary) servers could still function as originally intended. EA said something about how it was their right to decide whether or not they were going to do something with the IP in the future, but it's dystopian to me that deciding the future direction of an IP can include reaching out and making previous content that people paid for inaccessible. We're not even talking about piracy in this case, we're talking about restoring function to people with real copies.