Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts.

"We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."

EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown , which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games . To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago.

It's the distribution of modified copies of these now-defunct games that seems to have drawn the ire of EA's legal department. "Please stop distributing copies of our game clients and using our trademarks, logos, and artwork on your sites," EA's counsel writes in a note republished on the Revive website. "Your websites may easily mislead visitors to believe that you are associated or affiliated with EA—we're the only ones that get to wear the 'Official EA' dog tag."

Revive claimed over 900,000 registered accounts across its games, including nearly 175,000 players for the recently revived Battlefield Heroes.

EA's approach is the polar opposite to that of Disney, which recently worked with GOG to officially bring back online multiplayer support for classic Star Wars Battlefront 2 . The move is more reminiscent of Blizzard, which has recently shut down numerous fan servers devoted to restoring classic versions of World of Warcraft as it existed a decade ago.

In 2015, the Librarian of Congress denied a request by the EFF and others that would have allowed Revive's method of restoring online gameplay to "abandoned" games under a DMCA exception. Game publishers and trade groups fought hard against that request , with ESA president Mike Gallagher arguing that "there's no such thing as an obsolete game when you can revive it on any platform at any time" in an Ars interview. The Library of Congress can take up the issue again in 2018.