Damn, BF 1943 and BC2... I played both of those quite a lot. Now they are lost forever, never to be revisited (because, realistically, the multiplayer is the main, core experience of a BF game), unlike the 90s/2000s games of my youth that are still available in some form or other.

For me this is kind of a grim reminder that one day BF1 will be on this kind of list... Damn.

There really needs to be a better understanding at a consumer protection level that new entries in a property are not valid absolute substitute products for previous entries (you shouldn't be able to sunset any online title with no resource to play it again under the reasoning of "well, there's a newer one, just buy that dude"). Ideally some form of measure should be in place to be able to preserve or recreate the online functionalities of any title (especially if those functionalities are the core of the experience) before its functionalities are taken down.

"It's old"/"there's a newer one"/"only x people are playing"/"we might remaster/remake it in the future" shouldn't be valid excuses to erase any possibility of ever playing a game again, just release a minimum of resources for people to try to get it running again in some basement if they ever want to in the future. People are still playing Resident Evil Outbreak from fucking 20 years ago online on reverse engineered infrastructure, eventually there's ALWAYS demand.

But then again, right now the tv and film industry are facing a similar situation with streaming only shows getting taken down from their platforms with no alternative, basically being erased forever, and no measures have been taken against that soooo