The Revive team, a group of Battlefield devotees who have worked hard for over three years to let fans keep playing older games in the series (like 2142 and Battlefield 2), have been asked by Electronic Arts to “stop distributing and using their intellectual property”.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/09/oh-hey-battlefield-heroes-is-coming-back/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/ecy3rdbwjh2lhwp511iy.jpg” title=”Oh Hey, Battlefield Heroes Is Coming Back” excerpt=”Battlefield Heroes, my favourite Battlefield game, died an inglorious death when it tried to walk a free-to-play tightrope and fell clean off. It was a cool game with incredible visuals, though, so of course a group of fans have salvaged the code and brought it back.”]
“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”, a notice reads on Revive’s site.
“As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations.”
Revive started up in 2014 following the closure of the Gamespy, which made it almost impossible to play a number of classic PC multiplayer games online.
The issue here seems to be not that Revive are running servers, but that to get the old Battlefield games running they were also distributing modified versions of the original game clients.
Here’s Revive’s statement in full:
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. As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations.
Over the past 3 and a half years, Revive Network has filled a void in nearly 1 million players’ hearts by bringing favourite titles back to life after online services were closed after the GameSpy shutdown.
Only a few months ago, we took on the task of bringing multiplayer services online for a fan-favourite, Battlefield Heroes. The public reception for our efforts on this title were massive, and we never expected it to become as big as it was.
At this time, file downloads will be disabled.
This is probably the part where we have to say good bye. Before we leave the battlefield, we would like to thank all of the developers, artists, moderators, and last but not least every single player that helped make all of this a reality. Without you, it would not have become such a great time.
Signing off,
– The Revive Network Team
And here’s EA’s request which, for what it’s worth, was at least very polite:
Dear [REDACTED],
I write on behalf of Electronic Arts Inc. and its development studio DICE or, in other words, ‘those guys that make Battlefield’.
We’ve noticed that Revive Network has several projects and websites devoted to being a Medic by reviving older Battlefield games, including Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142. It’s great to see your enthusiasm for these titles. Not to brag, but we too get the nostalgia chills when booting up these classic entries in the Battlefield franchise.
We need a favour though: we must ask that you stop throwing down Ammo Crates. In other, more legal-styled terms, please stop distributing copies of our game clients and using our trademarks, logos, and artwork on your sites.
Thing is, your websites may easily mislead visitors to believe that you are associated or affiliated with EA and we’re the only ones that get to wear the Official EA dog tag. Since you’re Battlefield community members, we know that you are smart and helpful, and will respect that we must protect our intellectual property rights in the franchise.
Please drop us a line to let us know you’re on board with this. Should you have any questions regarding all this, please do not hesitate to contact me via email at [REDACTED]@ea.com.
Thanks,
[REDACTED]
IP Counsel
Electronic Arts Inc.
Please do not send angry emails to redacted@ea.com.
Comments
18 responses to “EA Asks Fans To Stop Keeping Old Battlefield Games Alive”
At least it was a cool take-down notice.
Probably only because the PR guy at EA knew it’d likely see its way to public eyes.
Don’t be fooled, this is just a classic “don’t do stuff that we don’t make money on”, situation.
Rerelease them packed with the new versions they don’t really want. $$$
Its somewhat odd, yes its true Revive was distributing the game clients, but surely this could have been worked around by requiring people to provide their own?
They did say that “please stop distributing copies of our game clients and using our trademarks, logos, and artwork on your site”
The Revive guys just went a bit overboard with shutting it down
Yeah, it seems like they could’ve just distributed something that makes whatever required changes to game files to get things running on their servers and avoided using any official EA stuff on their website and everything would’ve been fine.
Then again maybe the nature of the changes to the games makes this impractical for some reason.
Translation : ” don’t play out old games until we have time to repackage them, add micro transactions, and re sell it to you for $99″
Pretty much this. As soon as they figure out most people still consider BF2 the high point of the series… this is exactly what will happen.
i prefered 2142 to be honest
My favourite Battlefield game ever. I leveled up so many medals as a pilot. Ended up just doing laps of hotspots, hugging the terrain so close the guys respawning could hop off and not take fall damage.
I remember EA brought out a F2P Battlefield 2 with microtransactions. It obviously didn’t last long.
Let’s face it EA’s new games are just bad connection, over priced, microtransaction crammed, day one paid dlc, paid eposodic realeaed junk, people like myself love the old game’s because the weren’t
As much as I loathe EA, you guys are overreacting. They didn’t ask for the service to be shut down, just that Revive stop distributing the game client and its assets. All Revive had to do was make a binary patcher to make whatever changes are necessary to a user’s existing installation of the game. It’s not that difficult at all.
EA is completely in the right here. If this site had just been providing the software to be able to run BF2, EA most likely would not have had an issue. But given they were essentially distributing a pirated copy of the game, EA took them down.
ea has stopped selling the game that makes it abandoned-ware making it sort of legal
Not really. Even if they have abandoned the product. They still own the copyright untill it enters the public domain. You try taking them to court but that would not end well.
And this is why we cant get toilet paper with EA’s logo on it
which is a shame, I would love to rub my anus on EA everyday
I used to be part of a LAN camp for high school kids a few years back. Bring your own rig, or borrow a spare (we had a couple of decent ones). We’d do stuff during the day (laser tag, construction challenges etc), have a small gaming session in the afternoon, then after dinner, it was gaming until 1-2am.
We’d usually play some really good free games and ones that everyone was bound to have, but a big fav was battlefield. We actually contacted EA about it, and they gave us 30 license keys for Battlefield 2 for free to use with the stipulation that we say at one point “Buy Battlefield 3 (or whatever the current one was)”.
So we’d say, here is a free key, we have to say “X” to you for you to use it. Then we’d wipe them all off at the end of camp and use them again next one. Good Guy EA for once.