EA sent a notice to all owners of Rock Band for iOS that the company was going to shut down the game on May 31st and thanked them for having been part of it. This naturally drew the fury of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Rock Band players on Twitter even though many are less likely to be still playing the game after years after it was released. Rock Band has been a successful franchise for EA. The series featured additional songs that gamers can acquire through in-app purchases.

When an online game becomes too much of a burden to support or has too few players, it’s natural to expect the company behind it to discontinue the game. Unfortunately for EA, the game apparently still has its fans and they flooded EA’s Twitter accounts in protest.

These players have paid for both the game and the additional content and the decision to pull support for the game when it was still on sale on the App Store was certainly baffling. As it turned out, EA later turned the decision around in a statement released to the public. The company isn’t shutting down Rock Band for iOS after all.

Despite the reversal, this highlights the peril of online games. In the past, video games that have been purchased can still be played years, or even decades later provided that the console set and the game cartridge are still operational. With online games, players are at the mercy of the publishers or the operators of the games’ networks. When the network is retired, so is the game.

On the other hand, most online games have offline elements as well that should still be playable long after the online component had been turned off and Rock Band is one of them. Having yanked support for the entire game when the offline part should still be playable is an odd choice to make.

Touch Arcade pointed out that EA’s support page does list Rock Band to be among the discontinued games but only for the online features. Polygon, The Verge’s Gaming blog even went further to highlight a part of the licensing agreement for the game which states that those who purchase the game only licenses the game and all elements contained within and if EA terminates the game, all licensed elements would cease to function. In other words, if EA decides to shut down the game, it is within its rights to shut down the entire game, not just parts of it.

As pointed out by Guardian, another online game publisher, ngmoco, is shutting down its own online game, Eliminate, which was one of the company’s first online games with in-app purchase elements.

All these simply serve to point out that online games are different from video games of old, which are isolated in nature from the rest of the world, not just in game play and enjoyment but also in its operation. Players of online games no longer own copies of the games that they have spent money on, instead, they only own a license to play them.