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GameSpy Attempting to Dump Mac Gamers
An anonymous reader writes "Inside Mac Games reports that GameSpy is trying to license its way out of supporting the Mac." From the article: "The impact of GameSpy's pricing tactics could be devastating to the Mac gaming market. A number of recent games on the Mac such as Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, Neverwinter Nights, and others use GameSpy."
Right now there are more games I can think of that are MPOGs then are not on the mac side, including just about ever FPS out there minus Counterstrike. A statement like this can only come from someone who has no knowlage of the Macintosh platform... for one thing how do you know those Battle.NET people ARNT mac users.... Mac and PC users run on the same system (I know, I played Starcraft and DiabloII all the time with my friend who runs a PC) and Starcraft has a OSX client as does DiabloII.
Im sorry but your statment stinks of the same mentality of people who continue to keep the Mac down as a viable platform for gaming. A person who grew up on windows, only used windows and has no clue of the advantages to running a mac system, a linux system or the fact that all computers when the programmer knows what they are doing can run the same program with minimal effort done in changing the code, something Blizzard has done from day one, and still something that most PC heads cant grasp because they cant see past their own blinded shortsidedness.
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Don't forget that America's Army also uses GameSpy. I would hate to not be able to frag my Mac-loving friends anymore.
If you're going to try and pick a game that is available to lots of PC players but not to Mac players, you could have done a lot better than to mention a Blizzard product - since Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft are all still available for PC & Mac and play on the same servers.
I can jump on Battle Net and get my Starcraft fix in any time of the week and there are always lots of games (although more eastern hemisphere guys are on when it's after midnight in the states)--and that game is almost seven years old! This is because there are lots of people who like to play. Compare that to a Mac game that might sell a few hundred thousand units. The numbers just aren't there.
You DO realize Starcraft (and all Blizzard games) is available for the Mac, right? You could be playing against Mac gamers every time you log on to battle.net, for all you know.
Macs have around 1-2% of the market
If by "around 1-2%" you mean "6%", you are correct.
You know, I remember that Warcraft II for the Mac had built in TCP/IP play, allowing me to go on IRC and get trounced without having to pay for some hack like Kali that routed IPX traffic over TCP, like the inferior PC version required. Blizzard has always had excellent support for the Mac, and its employees whom I have met at developer conferences were all great guys. However, enough talking, I need to get back to leveling up my World of Warcraft character using this nice PowerMac G5 of mine...
Actually, that's exactly what will happen on the Mac side when Gamespy pulls their support.
It's kind of like how MacOS users used to get onto Kazaa and Audiogalaxy. Someone would write a piece of software (your "another tool") that would talk to their servers, then the servers would be modified and you'd lose your connection.
If Gamespy decides it doesn't want Mac users to connect to their servers anymore, then they'll cut the cord just like my example above. They are, in fact, doing just that with their new (many times larger) licensing fee.
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You like open source (or semi... APSL) and cross-platform?
OpenPlay is a start. Been around a while, but I don't know of any net games that use it. The mailing list seems to still be active, but I'm not a member, so I can't tell you what they're really up to.
Most of these comments are talking about how the end-users are suffering from GameSpy - it's really the developers. If I wrote an app and licensed GameSpy because they had a cross-platform SDK, I'd be pissed if they then told me that one of those platforms would cost extra. f00kers. Until there's a real viable (read: probably not OpenPlay yet) x-platform SDK for net play and discovering opponents, this kind of crap is going to go on and on and on and on...
Don't ask me. I don't know.
Brad Oliver of Aspyr Media that (among others) does mac ports of popular titles has commented on the issue in the Inside Mac Games forums, right here: http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php? p=192796&highlight=#192796
No. You're wrong on both counts. They may have also increased PC licensing fees, but they've increased Mac fees MUCH more. And it's not just Aspyr that can't pay the fees, which apparently add up to the entire development cost of some games, effectively doubling their cost to port. If this continues, no Mac publisher will touch GameSpy. The market just isn't big enough to justify it.
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