Resident Evil: Outbreak and Monster Hunter servers going offline

Via Capcom

This news was just confirmed internally, and I wanted people to know ASAP. :(


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After more than 3 years of online service, the external company providing server hosting for both Resident Evil: Outbreak and Monster Hunter has decided to exit the PlayStation 2 online business altogether, with no possibility of outsourcing either the service or the technology.

This means that online gameplay for both games will come to an end on December 31, 2007. Fortunately, the single-player campaigns in both games will be unaffected by this change and will continue to provide hours of entertainment on both PlayStation 2 and backwards-compatible PlayStation 3 hardware. Thank you for supporting Capcom’s online titles over the years!

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And just so you know, although these are older titles, we did want to make an effort to keep the fans happy and continue supporting online play. We've tried to extend the contract, move it someplace else, etc. It's not happening. The hosting partner (who I guess remains nameless here) is just quitting the business entirely and doesn't want to mess around with the time/money involved in porting anything. Thanks to everyone who has kept these games fun online for so many years.


best,
Seth

Note this is file 1 servers being talked about.
Discuss below via comments

Please add "Monster Hunter" in your thread title.

I'm shocked to see Monster Hunter going offline, I thought it was a popular game online.
And I expected Resident Evil Outbreak going offline soon because File #2 server was closed recently.

Done.

This would never happen on Xbox Live, this is one of the bad things about free servers, theirs no guarantee it will stay online, even if it is popular.

Don't forget it's only happening with the american and european versions. The japanese versions will be still online.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elven6

This would never happen on Xbox Live, this is one of the bad things about free servers, theirs no guarantee it will stay online, even if it is popular.

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This is also for the PS2. Sure it does suck, because this could end up happening to the PS3.

Least these people can do is release the server program to people to host a server on their computer, if they really want to play it online.

Then again, how popular are these games right now? If their player base has waned to a few hundred players a year, then they would have good incentive to drop it.

Of course now that news hit of the service going offline, everyone will scramble to play them before time runs out.