- I also suspect that EA wants to coerce people to buy and play newer games, especially ones with monetization in them, and to not have people critically compare EA's newer games (which are inferior in design) to their older games.
As much as I'd love to defend Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Battlefield Vietnam and that generation of gaming, it'd be so out of blind nostalgia. Nostalgia driven by a childish love of bug abuse, neglect for what the designers intended. There are classic titles that do stand out from modern releases of the franchise (Battlefield: Bad Company 2 + Vietnam Expansion namely) but to call newer games inferior in design is straight up incorrect from a variety of levels. It is a very time consuming and passion-driven process for a lot of developers to create titles, let alone the technical evolutions since then. There are features that we have lost or received ill-fitting replacements to (Campaigns / War Stories replacing Offline VS Bots), that may not always be for the worst.
With many of the new titles, we have received vastly new technological leaps alongside an increase in overall quality which was not possible in earlier generation titles. The Destruction 3.0 capabilities of the Frostbite engine are still vastly impressive. Greatly improved visuals have been leaping with new generations of technology. All that required a lot of work by Games Engine Programmers, Concept Artists, Environment Artists, Project Managers, Technical Artists and many many more. Games aren't getting inferior in design, they're simply getting so much more visually and logically intense that they will increasingly require more staff per technological leap to meet current Gaming Enthusiast and Consumer standards.
Then there is the slowly dwindling single-player / offline experience. With the technology at hand in the Battlefield games we know of (BF4, BF:H, BF1 & BF5), it is going to be exponentially harder to create an artificial intelligence that can react in response to the ever-evolving battlegrounds on which a multiplayer server round takes place. Single-Player itself is a controlled, scripted sequence of events that can be somewhat tailored for the AI and Player by Game Designers. EA has a division that has been working on Machine-Learning, called the Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division (SEED) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZsSx6kAi6Y - which may help improve offline support in the future, if DICE and SEED can work together to bring advanced self-taught AI to future entries in all their multiplayer franchises.
Modern Games may have more microtransactions (which have increasingly received vocal backlash per new entry), but to say they are inferior products outright is a blatant disregard of technological leaps, the jobs they create for the Games Industry and the vast amounts of time that go into them. Lots of Design and Pre-Production go into even a single proposal, let alone a finished product and the games we have seen are the successful project proposals which were able to deliver on their Minimum Viable and possibly even Desired products.
- The server hosting that Gamespy used to provide is easily replaceable - and fans have created their own server services for 2142, Bf2, and Bf 1942. It would be no effort for EA to launch 10 or 20 servers of their own to provide places for people to play, and that would represent an extremely-negligible expense and effort for EA. And I say 10 - 20 servers because before Gamespy server hosting shut-down, I don't think there were even 5 well-populated servers of 2142. There were lots of populated Bf2 servers, though.
I think the reason why EA hasn't made the classic Battlefield games available on their own servers is because EA, being a company run by greedy investors, just doesn't care to give players that enjoyment, because EA management doesn't place any value on that enjoyment, only on making money. And there probably isn't significant money to be made from the classic Battlefield games now - at least enough that EA would consider it worth lifting a finger to make available.
So, I don't think there's an issue about the cost of hosting servers and downloads for the classic Battlefields. I think that the issue is more that it wouldn't profit EA much to make them available, and so EA just doesn't care.
EA haven't made the classic games available because they are old, they simply cannot run on the modern hardware without additional support anymore. Even Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is starting to show it's age, sometimes no longer running for certain users. These older titles need first party support; it is not financially viable to take away team members from more important projects who actually know about the source code of these older titles and how to modify the source code to provide fixes that are desperately needed to create these fixes. Most of the experienced members who worked on these older titles are either senior developers and working on the newer titles where they are far more needed, working with new companies, retired from the industry or have passed away.
Hosting Servers itself isn't a problem, it's finding server hardware that are physically compatible with the original software that was written for these games; especially titles as old as Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 1942. These are hurdles of aging and slowly dwindling supplies of servers from that era. Server hosting will eventually come to a state where some games will no longer function properly (or at all), even if there are some examples of this not being the case (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory as an example).
At this point it is just better for the fans to learn and patch it up themselves. Not only because EA will not take away from their spearhead teams on projects, but because these fans are willing and financially able to take the time to learn the internal workings of and patch up these older titles. They have the time, resources and willpower to go create the new server hosting and operate on compatible server racks that EA simply wouldn't be able to operate. As much as I might get backlash for saying this:
EA isn't being greedy this time, they're just doing what's best.
These titles are so far detached at times from modern technology that they are eventually going to be wholly incompatible from the leaps of processing power we will get.
I do love these old titles just as much as any old-school Battlefield Veteran. They have a special place in my heart from my childhood but that is no means to disregard a logical assessment of the stakes of trying to create operational versions of them. For everything related to these old titles, there is a cost and a hefty one at that. What we see as "simple" could cost a fair lot more. A developer taken off of a Triple-A Project not only may hurt the efficiency of development for it, but it can also demoralise some of the team members working in conjunction with that developer. These "easily replaceable" elements of a game aren't as easy to replace as one would be lead to believe - something that's usually repeated by consumers who are outside of the physical understanding of the industry.
EA not adding these older titles to EA Play is an entirely reasonable option and it's the right call. Most of them don't have their replay value nowadays; they served their purpose and now act as gimmicky, old trophies from generations past, with each release coming closer to modern generations slowly building on what we know now. Fans already do everything that can be done to revitalize these old titles and give those who genuinely do love playing them the experiences they desire. There's not much for EA to do now except sell the titles outside of EA Play.
I stand by everything I've said here and more; 1942, Vietnam, 2 and 2142 are too outdated. Bad Company, 1943 and Bad Company 2 are on the verge of being outdated themselves, with the former two being almost entirely outdated by today's standards and Bad Company 2 being the only 7th Generation Battlefield title worth maintaining.
