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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."
Lame move. Basically, they don't want to continue to update their SDK for the Mac platform. Either it's costing them more, so they've increased licensing fees, OR, they don't want to bother with it any more.
Anyone know the before and after cost of the SDK license?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Only Mortal is a fine enough server browser for most Mac games, and GameRanger is still available if I remember right.
I remember really liking this company in the Quake1 days. The *world.com sites where great community sites. They were the source for mods, skins, console commands, quakemovies, etc.
Then they switched and became a really unappealing, money grubbing company. I even bought one of their for-life gamespy 3d licenses which they want me to upgrade. They switched to a for pay product and I don't think they put any money into the old one.
Use to be a great source as well for downloads, now it's waiting in line for a public ftp server. Why haven't they embraced torrents?
What happened at this company?
Yes, i know platforms range--ps2, xbox, gamecube, DS, cellular, etc. PC and Mac run on the same TCP protocol, just different internal programming (just like all platforms, after i think about it).,br>
If they are dropping supprot for a (fledging?) platform, then they might as well do it for Gamecube (Network adapter? whats that?), or even PS2, since it seems that it does not have the same online userbase as the xbox.
why isnt there a competitor to GameSpy? At least, one that is just as popular?
Thats not the point of the article. Some games depend on gamespy internally, and if they don't work out of the box now, then that makes the Mac platform even less appealing.
What with Mac these days being a Unix workalike, and with Linux being a Unix workalike, then isn't support for Mac almost the same as support for Linux? AND with Linux beginning to take desktop space away from Windows, a move away from Mac/Linux becomes the same as restricting oneself to a shrinking market share! (Of course, if some fundamental misunderstanding was written into the preceding, I'm sure someone will let me know, heh.)
I'm not into (online) gaming much, so forgive me, if I understood something wrong.
AFAIU GameSpy is a tool that helps you to locate other players that want to play the same game online. So, if they drop the support for my OS or fuck up things in other ways, I'll quit using it and search for companions/opponents somewhere else and with another tool or no tool at all.
So, what's the big fuzz around this?
Kosi
I own both a Dual 1.8 G5 and find the Mac to be a superior platform over Windows for everything I do in computing.....EXCEPT gaming. For that, I have my 3000+ homemade box.
As I get older, I dont game as much or as often. I expect there's a lot more like me in the same boat, they used to be hardcore gamers back in their 20's but I'm a lot more interested in producing and making videos and music these days.
Mac beats the PC hands down for that. ( for me )
I won't challenge you on which machine is better, PC or Mac. I will state a fact though. Gamespy is dumping Macs because it costs them more money than they make supporting them. The install base simply does not exist to support the continuation of Mac gaming under the gamespy umbrella. Again I am not bashing the Macs at all. It simply has come down to a dollars issue.
I will however take a moment to bash some of the Mac users though. They whine about not being able to play a specific game on their Macs all of the time. That, to me, is like buying an xbox and complaining that you can't play nintendo games on them. Well perhaps you should consider buying the platform that the software exists on if that's what you want to do, rather than buy the wrong thing and p1ss and whine and moan about no one writing games for the mac. The Mac is a great machine, it's just not for mainline games.
In the PC world, hardcore gamers avoid Gamespy like the plague (and we don't bother to read its crappy ad-driven "content" online, either).
Apple can easily remedy the problem we're discussing by making a gaming browser part of OS X. No need to let a third party squat on what should be a seamless interchange between client and server, managed by the OS.
Years ago I played a MMO flight sim called "Warbirds" (It's still around I think, but it's a shadow of its former self). When they went from version 1 to version 2 (3D models), they didn't release the Mac version concurrently. Version 2 had its own troubles, but it was just gorgeous. The models were beautiful. However, we spent several months staying in the old V1 arenas because a significant number of our squadmates were Mac jockeys. It wasn't fair to leave them behind, so we tried to keep them involved.
I wonder if current clans with Mac members will try to do something similar to support them.