EA Bans Myanmar Players From Origin, No Multiplayer Service Due To Embargo

A recent thread on Reddit revealed that Myanmar was recently blacklisted by EA, thus banning its players from accessing the publisher’s Origin service. This effectively blocked players from using the multiplayer modes of certain games, which is a significant feature in many of EA’s titles. It would seem that a large part of the reason for why this happened is due to U.S. laws which placed an embargo and sanctions on the country.

The news about the ban on Myanmar and the embargo blew up on Reddit when a user made a post about getting denied access to Origin. The user “trivial_sublime” wrote that he could not access any of his 20 games on Origin, including the newly released Battlefield 1 title set during World War I. After a little research, the user discovered that the service is no longer available in his country.

Readers have been contacting Kotaku about the event as well, which shows just how widespread the trend is and how many users it affected. The publication reached out to EA for a comment on the matter and the video game publishing company replied that they were trying to restore access to Origin users in Myanmar.

There has been no official explanation for the incident from EA itself except for a post by a community manager on a support thread at EA. According to “EA_tom,” Origin users in Myanmar couldn’t use the service because the country, along with a few others are currently under U.S. embargo.

“In compliance with US embargoes and sanctions laws, Origin is not available in Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Ukraine (Crimea region),” the post reads.

Another Origin representative also wrote that this was not an intentional ban on EA’s part. Rather, it’s a compliance to the law that all U.S. companies are required to follow.