Sony will be discontinuing online features for several of its popular PlayStation 3 games come May 2014, they confirmed on the PlayStation Blog.
Starting 20 May 2014, online services for Gran Turismo 5, Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 2, and Resistance 3 will no longer be available. If you’re a fan of games like MAG, SOCOM: Confrontation, and SOCOM: Special Forces, you get an even shorter window, as the online modes for those games will be discontinued 28 January 2014. Effectively, this will render MAG and SOCOM: Special Forces useless, as neither of those games has an offline mode.
The cynic in me wants to believe that the discontinuation is being done to push people towards new corresponding PlayStation products (Gran Turismo 6, and Killzone Shadow Fall), but on the other hand, it is entirely reasonable and possible to suppose that the cost of maintaining the servers was far too great considering the presumably low population all these games were getting.
Still, it’s a rather uncharacteristically anti gamer move by Sony (especially considering that some of these games weren’t even three years old) at a time when they are doing their best to sell themselves as being ‘for the gamer.’
