Sony ends online support for SOCOM and MotorStorm Pacific Rift

The consumer electronics giant has a plethora of titles which it supports but on the 1^st of October MotorStorm Pacific Rift, Arctic Edge and SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 will not be among those titles.

Sony has announced that it plans to end supporting a number of titles by the end of the quarter and listed four titles. Among the titles is MotorStorm Pacific Rift, the sequel to the PlayStation 3 launch title.

A number of racing titles have been taken offline with titles such as Formula One Championship Edition, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, MotorStorm and Race Driver; GRID have all been ‘decommissioned’ in recent years.

Whether or not that means Sony is bringing in a new line of first and third-party racing titles in the future remains to be seen but a number of developer have confirmed they are working on sequels to racing games.

Polyphony Digital has confirmed they are working on Gran Turismo 6 but that is all that the gaming world knows about the title. In fact, neither Sony nor the game’s developer have mentioned which console the game will be released on.

At the same time EA is currently working on the latest instalment of the Need for Speed series, which is currently under development at Criterion Games, known for their work on the Burnout series.

MotorStorm’s PlayStation Portable entry, Arctic Edge, will also lose its online support as well as one of the SOCOM titles. Fireteam Bravo 3 is another title on the console that is set to receive the ‘no more online gameplay’ treatment, which is sure to upset the handful of hardcore SOCOM fans.

The SOCOM series is fast fading away after a number of PlayStation 2 titles from the same series were previously decommissioned as well with SOCOM: U.S. NAVY SEALs Fireteam Bravo and Tactical Strike.

That is not all as The Eye of Judgment, another PlayStation Portable game, will also be taken offline. The PlayStation 3 version of the game lost its support earlier on and it seems that PSP version was not generating enough traffic online to warrant continuing it.

It should be noted that the game’s offline components such as the campaign and story modes will still work as before but there will be no online components, however LAN Parties will still be functional.

Sony is not the only studio to pull support for its titles as all the other publishers such as EA and Ubisoft, among others, have stopped supporting certain titles when there is not enough traffic to warrant it. Titles such as Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and The Godfather II are two examples of this.

One can expect a number of titles to follow MotorStorm and SOCOM in the future.