Come on, people. I totally get the hate for the online DRM, but blurting out stuff like the servers being shut down in three years is quite the exaggeration. If it ever came to that, the company would patch the game so that the servers aren't necessary to play. Maybe they'd implement another form of DRM, or not, but they wouldn't take a huge dump on the hundreds of thousands that bought the thing and kill everyone's ability to play it. That'd just be a PR suicide. Come on.
Some people really seem to think certain game companies are truly, consciously and deliberately out to screw over their own customers. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Words in bold convey uncertainty. People paid $80 for uncertainty whether they would be able to play the game 5 years down the road.
And trust me, some businesses exist to simply make as much money as possible or short term profits, because that's how the execs performance is reviewed by the Board, which of course factors into how they are renumerated.
Several games have had their DRMs patched out after a few years. Anno 1404 comes to mind, and that one's quite relevant as I believe its protection scheme had an online component. And this is Ubisoft, the champions of draconian DRM.
It's just baseless cynicism to assume EA would simply shut down an entire game
that can function as a singleplayer product. They would indeed suffer a big public relations hit, and leave themselves wide open to legal retribution unless the Terms of Service explicitly said something about the matter
right now.
Someone said earlier they're not obligated to provide support for the game after X years, and I don't know if that's true, but even if it is, for games like this customer support is only part of the company's ongoing effort to keep the thing running. At the same time, we aren't talking about an MMORPG that simply cannot function outside a multiplayer environment, so reasonable measures can and probably will be taken when the time comes.
Sure, you can say my statements are baseless as well, but it seems a lot more likely that they
wouldn't deliberately shoot themselves in the foot.