(Pocket-lint) - Fans of EA's Tetris games on smartphones and tablets have been put on notice that the games will stop being playable on both iOS and Android as of April 21, 2020.

The information comes from a pop-up notification that players are receiving when they open the game, letting them know the planned date for discontinuation. According to the notice, they won't be playable from that date, regardless of previous purchases or downloads.

The games in question are EA's Tetris and Tetris Blitz, two spins on the classic block-busting puzzler, and while a lack of physical buttons might have been a downside for some, they've got solid reputations as mobile outings for the franchise.

The explanation for quite why the games are getting the can comes down to rights — The Tetris Company (yep, that's its real name) sold new rights last summer for mobile games in the franchise to N3TWORK, so it's not a huge surprise that existing games might be killed off. In fact, The Tetris Company has since confirmed that EA's announcement is as a result of the new rights purchase.

That said, most casual players are likely to have missed that little transaction, so it'll still come as a shock to many.

N3TWORK's first entry in the series has been announced for mobiles: Tetris Royale, which sounds an awful lot like the Nintendo Switch's Tetris 99, a surprise battle royale take on the game. That game was developed by a different studio called Arika, so if you didn't have a sense for how complicated Tetris' rights were before, you should do now.

In the meantime, though, you've got about three months left to play these games if you're a particular fan, while you might struggle to download them before then if you haven't already - our iOS App Store searches are already proving fruitless.

Writing by Max Freeman-Mills.