EA pulls plug on Spare Parts’ online mode
Having commemorated its first birthday only two months back, EA is pulling the plug on XBLA platformer Spare Parts. The company took the decision to discontinue support for the game’s online co-operative mode due to the dwindling number of players populating the servers. Money and resources spent on upkeep can be put to better use elsewhere, EA claims:
“The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy… But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level — fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles — where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running.”
Spare Parts launched to minimal acclaim back in early 2011, aggregating a Metacritic rating of 52. Andrew Crews helmed our review and didn’t think a great deal of Bright Light’s robo-platformer either:
“Spare Parts is a failure in almost every category. The gameplay is below average and the problems with the game are constant… To be honest, almost every action adventure XBLA game is better than Spare Parts.”