EA Blasted for Attempted Closure of Battlefield 3 Fansite

A dedicated Battlefield fan has hit back at Electronic Arts for trying to shut down - and completely delete - his fansite. We guess that's one reason to hold a bit of a grudge.

The webmaster of one BF3Nation had to struggle with downtime over the last week, after a chap from EA's IP Enforcement division decided that the site "contains material that infringes copyrights owned or controlled by EA."

In particular, EA had beef with the site's design, which allegedly took the form of "an exact replica of a copyrighted website owned by EA and thus infringes EA’s copyright in its own website."

What might be annoying the company a little more is the fact that BF3Nation has been offering Beta keys and hacks to "premium subscribers" - a sham of a fansite, noticed by excaliburps on Twitter.

BF3Nation's webmaster has admitted to using a background image from the official source, but instead tries to make out that EA has been hunting down the little guy. As a result, he has some choice words for the publisher.

"This has to be the ultimate slap in the face of one of the biggest game fan sites for Battlefield 3," writes the site owner. "The amount of buzz this site helps to generate for Battlefield 3 we feel that they should be paying us, not try to have us removed.

"On behalf of BF3Nation we would like to give you a big wag of the finger, for basically shitting on your loyal fans. If this story is a prelude on how you treat the development of game, we can only HOPE that the release won’t be a huge disappointment."

Not sure if now's an appropriate time to mention that we've seen Battlefield 3 for ourselves, and it's looking mighty delicious. But we'll throw it out there anyway.