Electronic Arts has responded to complaints that the Origin service is unavailable in Myanmar, with Community Manager EA_Tom announcing that the company is working on restoring access to affected customers.
The whole ordeal started with players in Myanmar finding out that their access to legitimately purchased Origin games had been blocked. According to ‘Champions,’ EA’s volunteer moderators, the block was due to complying with economic sanctions not allowing Electronic Arts to do business in specific countries. Players have no ability to access their games and, as it appears, EA had no intention of offering any sort of compensation for those who were locked out of their games or had bought newer titles (Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, etc) only to find that their purchases are useless.
For those who pay attention to political games, the ban makes no sense. According to users on the forums, the bans only went into place last month despite Myanmar being under economic sanctions by the US for years now with EA doing nothing to prevent purchases from the country. Furthermore, the economic sanctions were lifted by President Obama on October 7th, meaning that Electronic Arts is continuing to enforce economic sanctions that haven’t existed in close to a month.
Many are also doubting EA’s handling of the situation as other digital services in Burma/Myanmar (Steam, Good Old Games, etc) have been functioning in the country just fine. MMO Fallout will update as soon as we have more information.
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