FIFA Online 3

~ the obit ~

The FIFA that reached Turkey came in a box with a year printed on it, and the deal was that you paid once and it stopped mattering when the next one shipped. FIFA Online 3 ran on the opposite deal, and it ran in a set of countries that never included mine. This is not a translation gap. It is a licensing map, drawn by Electronic Arts, on which Korea and Vietnam are colored in and everywhere west of that is not.

Electronic Arts made it in Seoul, at the studio that had been Spearhead before EA bought it, which is worth saying because this is one of the few EA products designed from the start for an Asian free-to-play market rather than ported into one. Nexon published it in South Korea on 18 December 2012. By October 2013 it was the second most played game in the country, in a market where the top of that chart is a national conversation.

From there it moved through publishers rather than through regions on its own. Garena took it to Thailand in July 2013 and Vietnam that September. Singapore and Malaysia came in October, Indonesia the following February. Tencent launched it in China in April 2014. Three publishers running their own servers against one game built in Seoul.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

The game was free and the players were not. You built a squad by pulling cards, and a card was a specific footballer at a specific season rating, which meant a 2006 version of a player and a 2013 version of the same player were different objects with different prices. This is the model that eventually became Ultimate Team everywhere, but the online-only Asian FIFA was where EA learned how far it could be pushed.

It also ran on hardware that a PC cafe in Bangkok or Hanoi actually had, which mattered more than any feature. A boxed FIFA in 2013 assumed a machine somebody had bought for gaming. FIFA Online 3 assumed a room full of identical rentals and was built to run well on them, and that is most of why it took the audience it did.

~ three shutdowns ~

FIFA Online 4 launched in South Korea on 17 May 2018, published by Nexon, aimed at exactly the people already playing FIFA Online 3. The older game was switched off after server maintenance on the morning of 2 August 2018, less than three months later. Nexon had spent five and a half years building that audience and then spent three months moving it.

Southeast Asia went second. Garena announced the end and closed its servers on 30 June 2020. China went last and went slowly on purpose. Tencent stopped taking top-ups and new registrations, then closed the transfer market and ranked matches on 1 April 2021. The servers themselves went at midnight on 7 June 2021, nine years after Seoul, and the same game was dead for the third time.

~ what replaced it ~

FIFA Online 4 outlived the FIFA name itself and is now EA Sports FC Online, still the biggest football game in Korea, still built in Seoul. The sequel is doing fine. That is the ordinary way for a live game to end, replaced by its own successor rather than by a competitor, and it does not make the servers any less off.

What is genuinely gone is the squad. Everything anybody assembled over eight years was a rental against a running service, and the migration offers were partial at best across three separate publishers in three separate markets. A card economy is only real while somebody is paying to keep the database warm.

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