Please Bring The Battle for Middle-earth Back — The Community Is Still Here
First of all, thank you for responding and for acknowledging that people still care about these games.
I wanted to add something because I think this is about more than nostalgia at this point.
It has been almost 20 years since Battle for Middle-earth II and The Rise of the Witch-king came out, and even longer since EA actively supported the series. Yet people are still playing them, fixing them, creating mods and basically keeping the games alive themselves.
That is pretty unusual for a game series this old.
BFME Arena and the All-in-One Launcher, for example, report more than 126,000 registered users and over 338,000 games played/processed. When you check the service, you can still see dozens or sometimes around a hundred players online at the same time.
And that is only one part of the BFME community.
Age of the Ring is approaching one million downloads on ModDB, with more than 22,000 people in its Discord community. Edain Mod has more than 600,000 downloads. The community Patch 2.02 for Rise of the Witch-king is still being worked on and was updated again in June 2026.
The Third Age is still full of BFME projects, maps and mods.
Over the years, fans have made HD patches, balance patches, new factions, campaigns, maps, launchers, matchmaking systems and even their own online infrastructure just so these games can continue to work.
There is also Battle for Middle-earth: Reforged. Nobody knows exactly what will ultimately happen with that project, but its original remake trailer reached more than 1.2 million views. I think that alone says quite a lot about the interest that still exists around BFME.
Of course, these numbers overlap. Someone playing Age of the Ring may also use BFME Arena, so it would be misleading to simply add everything together.
But that is not really the point.
The important part is that people have been keeping a commercially unavailable game series alive for nearly two decades without official support.
That should say something about the demand.
And the current community is probably only a fraction of the potential audience.
There are many former BFME players who would come back immediately if they could simply buy the game, install it and play without having to search for old discs, community patches, unofficial installation guides and different multiplayer solutions.
There are also younger Lord of the Rings and strategy-game fans who have never had a real opportunity to play BFME.
Many people currently use community solutions simply because there is no official modern version available to buy.
I know I would happily buy these games again, and I am sure I am far from the only one.
What I think most of us would dream of is a remaster of:
- The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth
- The Battle for Middle-earth II
- The Rise of the Witch-king
It would not need to completely reinvent the games.
Keep the gameplay, atmosphere, music, factions and visual identity that made BFME special. Just make the games work properly on modern PCs: higher resolutions, modern frame rates, stable multiplayer, matchmaking, better networking, bug fixes and proper compatibility with current hardware and Windows versions.
Even if a full remaster is unrealistic, I think many of us would gladly accept something closer to a Legacy Edition or Definitive Edition.
Give us a legal way to buy the games again. Make installation simple. Restore reliable multiplayer. Let the existing community continue doing what it has already been doing for years.
The recent return of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North – Legacy Edition is also one reason why I think people are talking about this again.
A LOTR game that had disappeared from modern stores has returned, and we are hearing that other classic LOTR games may return as well.
So perhaps bringing BFME back is not completely impossible.
At the same time, I think most BFME fans understand that the situation is probably complicated.
There are licensing issues surrounding The Lord of the Rings, the Peter Jackson films, EA's original games and the companies that currently own or control the relevant rights.
We are not pretending that EA can simply press a button and put BFME on Steam tomorrow.
That is actually why I would like to ask EA a slightly different question:
Is there anything we, as the BFME community, could realistically do to help show that bringing these games back would be commercially worthwhile?
Would a petition help?
Steam wishlists or another official expression-of-interest campaign?
A community survey?
Player statistics?
Would it help if the different BFME communities collected their numbers together?
Would contacting the relevant rights holders make any difference?
Most importantly, is there any type of evidence that EA would actually consider meaningful when deciding whether it is worth investigating the licensing situation?
There are modders, developers, tournament organizers, content creators and ordinary players who have spent years keeping BFME alive.
If there were a real, constructive way for us to help demonstrate demand, I think a lot of people would participate.
For many of us, BFME was not just another licensed game.
It was one of the best Lord of the Rings game series ever made, and in my opinion still one of the most unique RTS series ever released.
I genuinely miss these games.
I would love to be able to buy them again officially, support them legally, introduce them to new players and play them online without all the workarounds that are necessary today.
So even if EA cannot promise anything, please at least consider looking into what would be required to bring the series back.
And if there is something the community can do to help make that possible, please tell us.
The players are still here.
After all these years, we are still playing.
And many of us would gladly return to Middle-earth.
