Mr Puggsly said:
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What. The only reason it costs EA a significant amount of money for online play is because they host dedicated servers for all their sports titles. This is why they are eventually shut down. This is a non-factor for games that use a P2P network, which is why older games like the original Killzone still support online play to this day, even with a virtually non-existant playerbase. There are literally no costs involved, as online play is handled entirely through consoles connecting directly through each other, as opposed to having to go through a server elsewhere. It's much like bittorrent, in which there is no host for a file, rather users are leeching off of each other.
And Microsoft by no means "takes on the financial burdens of online play". I'm not even sure where you could get such an idea from. All they do is retain all information related to your online ID, and make it accessible for all games. I suppose it saves developers the trouble of having to track such information themselves, but prior to such unified networks, they likely wouldn't have bothered with such things anyway.
Why else would EA be shutting down servers for online play even for titles that use XBL? It's certainly not because Microsoft is providing the online service in place of EA.