EA And Xbox Live
By Mike Viscel -- Staff Writer
Published 10:03 AM CST March 19, 2003
Our colleagues over at Gameindustrybiz.com recently posted an interesting article regarding the European launch of Microsoft's 'Xbox Live' online gaming network. The article is a great read and sheds a lot of light on Electronic Arts' recent decision to pull support for Xbox Live. Check it out:
The reasons behind EA's decision not to support Live haven't been elaborated upon publicly by the publisher, but it's safe to say that it all boils down to a matter of control. Microsoft wants to keep as much of the marketing, branding, billing and hosting of Xbox Live under its control as possible; EA, however, wants to be able to change all of these aspects around in order to suit itself.
Microsoft's argument would be that this would potentially be detrimental to the quality of the Xbox Live service to end users. They're not wrong, either; sources have indicated to gi.biz that one of EA's demands is that they should be allowed to turn off servers for old versions of games as soon as they release new versions. So, for example, your copy of FIFA 2003 would stop working on Xbox Live as soon as FIFA 2004 showed up - a handy way to force punters to upgrade for EA, but not a great reflection on the Xbox Live service as a whole.
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Now, I'm not saying having EA on Xbox Live is a bad thing, but look what they're trying to do...
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