SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/ea-shuts-down-fan-run-servers-for-older-battlefield-games/
Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts.
"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 writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."
EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown, which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games. To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Geotti on Sunday October 29 2017, @01:18AM
I wanted to write a "motivating" post about how they should use the momentum they have right now and reverse the actual Gamespy servers and protocols, so that a connection is a hosts-file edit away instead of having to hex and distribute the binaries, but apparently Project Reality already did that [github.com], so I don't really understand what the deal is here, but would be interested to know.
Now, dropbox... That is an entirely different animal to skin.