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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.
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
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.
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?