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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."
This is a nice example why vendor lock-in and closed source _can_ be bad for business.
It's their loss. Mac gamers are just going to have to do what everyone who gets fed up with Gamespy does and switch to another server browser. Maybe they'll like it more or maybe they wont, but Gamespy had better hope that the Mac doesn't gain any ground as a gaming platform because then they would have to try and regain ground with a whole community of pissed of gamers who are wondering why they were dumped in the first place.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Uhm, by the very definition, if the money isnt there then its not a viable platform. Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company. The reason the competition is so small is that the market jsut isnt there.
Why haven't they embraced torrents?
they can't charge for torrents, or make you buy a super-ultra-platinum-extra-bonus membership for only $6/month.
This is one of the things holding the America's Army Mac port back, the GameSpy license needed renewing but they are now asking WAY too much for it. And since the in-game browser is run off GameSpy it makes the game useless.
GameSpy was a great thing...8 years ago. Started by a Navy man that wanted a quick and easy way to find and connect to Quake servers, but it turned into a mega-corp somewhere and adopted many MS techniques of crush and conquer. FilePlanet use to be great for game downloads, but now I can't get anything even with a logon (I'm not paying them for that crap when there are many other download sites available).
This affects more then just Macs, it affects everything they touch. Soon you'll need to logon to read the news at planetquake.com or even need to PAY them to read the news.
People need to stop relying on GameSpy and show them we are not going to put up with their crap...unfortunately most people WILL put of with their crap because they are too lazy or narrow minded to find something else.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Of course, long term, a software house looking to produce a game for both PCs and Macs long term will choose an agnostic server browser, or host their own, so GameSpy, ultimately, is going to lose with this move.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That assumes that the Mac platform was ever appealing to gamers.
Don't get me wrong, I use my Macs every day. One runs my music studio, another is about to become my new web server, and my iBook goes with me everywhere gets used for just about every other computing task that I do.
But when I want to play games, I do so on either a Windows PC or a console. I'm all about using the right tool for the job.
Yes, I could play World of Warcraft on the eMac I use for recording music, but why bother when an el-cheapo PC with a decent video card, which I can keep anywhere in the house, does the job just fine?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
* PCGamesInc releases "PC Wars Ultimate Mega Online!", for PC and consoles.
* MacSoft, or some other third party, then buys the rights to do a Mac port. They, not PCGamesInc, pay oodles of cash to developers to do the work, and eat the loss if the game doesn't sell.
* PCGamesInc then profits, without any work on their part (except for the lawyer signing the rights.)
Now, tell me again why software houses would even care about the number of Mac gamers as long as they know that there are enough that, as long as they don't make the game too PC centric (say, by chosing a server browser technology that's actively hostile to Macs in favour of something agnostic that's just as good and reasonably priced), they'll get cash from someone wanting to do a Mac port?
Personally, if I was running a software house, I'd care. It's money. I'm not upsetting anyone by keeping my options open, and I'm opening the door to raking in more cash in future without any extra expenditure today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If GameSpy puts themselves out of reach for companies, companies will simply adopt another solution. GameSpy's loss, because this might cause companies to switch to another solution on both Mac and PC platforms to have a unified interface between their two software versions. Yes, it would require coding work to swap out Gamespy for another solution, but I'm sure some enterprising company will come up with a solution that is very similar to Gamespy in it's programming interfaces.
Listen, if you are really interested in gaming, you get a Windows PC. If you have things that are more important than gaming for your home computer, then choose based off that. Just know that YOU ARE GOING TO BE SCREWED WHEN IT COMES TO GAMES. If you don't understand this going in, well, that is your fault. I have no doubt that the market for gaming on Macs is growing...if it were shrinking, it would be non-existant. Ok, that's not really a fair statement to make, I remember the bitter feeling as a kid that I couldn't play the games my friends could on a PC. The market for gaming on Macs is much much much smaller than on PC....on Linux, it is even less. If a company chooses to not support other OS's than Windows, that is their choice. You may not like it, but as I mentioned earlier, it shouldn't come as a surprise. There aren't a bunch of PC users conspiring to keep Mac gamers down, as you would like to think. It is a simple business decision. If the effort and cost do something is > than the profit you get back, you don't do it. If Mac gaming was a cash cow, then you would see people scrambling to port to the Mac. This is not the reality. It is great that more companies are supporting Macs, if you are crying now, it was much much worse 10 years ago. The only thing that will make people take Macs and Linux more seriously (in gaming) are when they gain more of the marketshare from Windows. Until then though, if the main reason you have your PC is for games...then don't get a Mac. There is no conspiracy, only business.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company.
Bullshit. Gamespy use to have free versions, and gave the SDK's away so they could lock companies in. Now that they are Bigger, they cant afford to offer the SDKs You always develop the SDK and give it away for free, you make your money on the license later.
And building on OSX is much easier now, if you have a standard platform, you can cross develop a customer client that works on both. One of the nice things about OSX is games run in OpenGL on top of a unix based OS. (Can you say Linux port anyone?)
BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye be the replacement?
The gamespy interface in games is weak and lame and devoid of basic features. And half the time, the filter features don't even work in the released game! I've bought a couple games in the last year where filters had no effect at all and another game where I have yet to see a single game server pop up in 9 months, with all filters off (no connection to master server).
If they want to be the defacto game search interface for the industry, they need to get off their lazy butts and do it right. And while Macs aren't raking in the market share, they are part of the market, DEAL WITH IT! It's not like GameSpy code is rocket science anyways. Yet they STILL manage to hose it often enough.
I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the problem is that 'the' Mac guy at GameSpy got sick of doing the same amount of work that 15 people do for the PC version and quit.
This sounds like a geniune market opportunity for someone to come into the market and develop a nice cross platform (win/osx/X11) interface and service for games.
Make one app and keep improving and supporting it - instead of the GameSpy approach of making one, raking in fees from suckers (like me) and then dumping it for a new product which is basically the same only web based and slow and buggy and trying to charge your lifetime customers for it.
If GameSpy actually had the PC side of their stuff working well, it might be a lost cause, but they can't even get their core market right, so screw em. Time for some better company to squish them....
Everquest. It's available for Windows and MacOS, but they can't talk to each other. Sony decided to segregate the two (paraphrase follows) 'so the mac users could play without having to deal with all the high-level windows version users.'
Actually, that's exactly this Mac users wanted to do. I wanted to play with my friends online.
So I dropped my Everquest account and switched to Lineage and Shadowbane. Problem solved.
On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, but they damn well know if you're a Mac or Linux user and screw you accordingly.
The original hypothesis is indeed flawed. A lot of original software developers will be sloppy and write non-portable code. The fact that the Half-Life code sucked balls in terms of portability was the entire reason it never actually got ported to the Mac. Competent programers=cheap ports.
As a matter of fact, I consider the Mac a viable gaming platform, and I do all of my hardcore gaming on it. I have a GameCube for a few pickups, but most of my time is spent gaming on my Mac. And yes, I'm quite serious.
You talk the way you do because you're in the majority. Were fortune to change, you'd feel the way we do.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
But what do sales figures mean to the gaming market? I work for a government organisation that probably has around 200 000 PCs and maybe a dozen Macs. I can guarantee you not one of those PCs is used for online gaming.
THIS is where PCs make the good sales: governments and corporations, and neither of those outfits are into gaming.
Hasn't been a decent game since Unreal Tournament anyway...
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Had a look at this link, some guy seems to think that such a move would be good for microsoft as it would slow the growth of Mac gaming. I'm sure it would be impossible to prove.
But honestly how much effort does it take to support the mac sdk? From a coding perspective, isn't it just getting a list of servers from another server? I thought all the important work would be on the server side, isn't that what people are paying for? what the server provides? a list of other servers? I mean that functionality would be *nothing* compared with even just the standard networking code in a game. I think the SDK shouldn't really take that much effort to support, so I can't really see any reason to drop it.
I have a Mac and a PC, and to me the mac market does seem to be growing. You used to never see mac's anywhere in tech circles. But these days, although I admit that not everyone has one, it's pretty hard to go any tech event without seeing a few ibooks or powerbooks around. That's growth, and for Game-Spy to drop a growing market where they already have a product does seem a bit ludicrous.
So why drop a product that shouldn't really take much support, that you have already written, which is in a growing market... if it's not M$ then it beat's the f*&$ out of me...
Actually many highly competent developers write great code that is completely non-portable. It's called Direct-X which is in no way shape or form portable to another platform (without reimplementing the entire API on the target platform).
It has zero to do with programmer competency and everything to do with API choices. If your game is programmatically tied to Windows, odds are it will not be ported.
Personally I think this is a stupid move by developers, but that's just me.
.technomancer