Titanfall Is Disappearing Forever
And while most games die with a whimper, usually due to old age, de-listing Titanfall and sending it to the video game cemetery is an undeserved fate.
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Electronic Arts has pulled the plug on Titanfall, the first game of the same-name FPS series, by permanently de-listing the game from digital storefronts. And while most games die with a whimper, usually due to old age, de-listing Titanfall and sending it to the video game cemetery is an undeserved fate for the formative video game that heavily influenced the FPS genre. Why? Well, Titanfall isn’t that old. So, why is EA doing it?
According to Kotaku, 2014’s Titanfall, the game that propelled Respawn Entertainment to the heights of EA’s superstardom, has been removed from sales. And while it won’t be available to curious newcomers to the series, this multiplayer-only first-person shooter featuring mechs will remain playable to existing customers, at least for a while. EA and Respawn Entertainment also plan to remove Titanfall from subscription services such as EA Play and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on March 1, 2022. Also, the servers will remain live for those who own the game, though neither developer nor the publisher has stated for how long the servers will be operational.
EA hasn’t given any specific reason for removing Titanfall from sales, though the game has been suffering from numerous connectivity and server issues, which isn’t that surprising when it comes to Electronic Arts. But its main problem is a plague of hackers whose activities render the game unplayable. However, EA suffered a major data leak earlier this year, with hackers stealing up to 750 GB of data, including source codes and software development tools that grant “full capacity of exploiting on all EA services.” After the company refused to pay the ransom, hackers made the data public and thus accessible to anyone looking to hack the game.
That particular event had nothing to do with Titanfall, whose hacker infestation began years prior. But it does explain how a gaming giant such as EA Games managed to openly ignore threats made by the aforementioned hackers. They simply don’t care. And besides, why would the company pay the ransom to prevent unauthorized access to their servers when people have been illegally accessing those same servers anyway, for free? Well, that’s a discussion for an entirely different day. But it’s worth pointing out that EA’s negligence towards Titanfall mirrors in the fact that a frustrated player had to hack into Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment’s current focus point, in order to get the companies to pay attention to the issues plaguing Titanfall.
Titanfall was an incredibly ambitious project at the time of its release since it featured multiplayer-only game mode, carried by its phenomenally fluid movement system and mech combat. These factors made the game into a brilliant oddity that would lay the foundation for all of Respawn’s future projects — including Apex Legends. Unfortunately, given the ongoing security issues Electronic Arts and its various studios are currently facing, the fall of Titanfall isn’t all that surprising. It isn’t easy to resuscitate a gaming title past one point. Some attempts are successful, like with Cyberpunk 2077, but for the most part, it’s better to put the struggling game down than let it live off the agony of its own fandom — we’re looking at you, Rockstar Games.
