EA has announced that it's taking Plants vs. Zombies 3 offline for an extended period in order to put a "major overhaul" into effect, pledging to "go even further to make the game truly special".
In an announcement post on its website, EA says that starting from October 15th (which is yesterday), in-app purchases won't be available anymore, and the game will also no longer be available to download, although you'll still be able to play it if you have it installed.
From November 15th, Plants vs. Zombies 3's servers will go down, and you'll no longer be able to play the game across Android or iOS. That counts for all territories, too.
In the aforementioned post, EA thanks players for checking out Plants vs. Zombies 3 "during our soft launch", which began back in January.
However, in the name of making the game "truly special", EA says it intends to put a "major overhaul" into effect, although it doesn't go into detail regarding exactly what that overhaul might entail.
EA thanks players for its "enthusiasm and feedback", which, given the volume of negative responses to Plants vs. Zombies 3's aforementioned soft launch from disgruntled players, is certainly one way to put it.
Reading between the lines, that's probably the reason for this decision, although of course, EA and PopCap aren't going to admit that the game hasn't connected with people. Well, not again, anyway.
It remains to be seen exactly what EA and PopCap intend to do in order to save Plants vs. Zombies 3 from an untimely grave, but the studios haven't given any kind of timeline for when we can expect the game to come back online.
They have, however, confirmed that your coin balances will be saved "as long as you've connected your account through Google Play, Apple ID, or your EA account". Game progress, however, will be reset when the game does eventually relaunch.
