Slashdot Mirror
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?
Why use Gamespy? Cant they use alternate game hosting services to host the games? heck, some witty people made XConnect, allowing you to play XBox System Link games online.. Don't see why the mac community can't make their own hosting services, or use one of the computers in the game to 'host' the game/server while they play?
This is a nice example why vendor lock-in and closed source _can_ be bad for business.
What really surprises me is that gamespy has a bunch of ads and they still charge a licensing free to the game maker.
Lucky bastards. I wish they would drop the PC support too.
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.)
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.
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.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
A mac version of the all seeing eye? that would be a worthwhile interace. unfortunatley my company blocks it so i can't check.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Don't forget that America's Army also uses GameSpy. I would hate to not be able to frag my Mac-loving friends anymore.
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.
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
What happened? What do you mean? It's still with us:
http://www.kali.net/
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.
Of course, that posits that there are such software houses in great quantity that consider the Mac platform a significant market *worth* supporting with time and money.
The value of GameSpy to consumers is a function of the number of other GameSpy users. Do we really believe that eliminating Mac users significantly alters the number of GameSpy users?
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.
Shortsidedness is the quality of a golf shot that misses the green near the flag, resulting in a more difficult chip. To hit such a shot is to shortside onesself.
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 )
Market != installed base.
Other than that I fundamentally agree with you... This is a place, that Apple could step in, and help significantly....
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.
not a charity. They live or die on their financial decisions.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
When you're rushing me with Zerglings you're rushing a "Mac gamer."
Macs have around 1-2% of the market
If by "around 1-2%" you mean "6%", you are correct.
but Linux seems to be taking off worldwide
Five Years Ago called. They want their hype back.
Widespread use of Linux on the home user's desktop was a pipedream which precious few believe anymore.
I may be naive, but I've been thinking that the bigger game developers ought to cooperate and form some kind of platform-agnostic server browsing service which would untie them from the pc/mac lock-up that is now. I really hate it when I can't play with my PC friends just because I've got a mac, and this GameSpy mess really needs a solution, obviously.
* 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.
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...
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
Hmm.. I was a long time user of Kali back in the day when it was the ONLY way you could play games online.
I can say this.. Jay Cotton the writer is a decent guy from what I saw and heard of him. Not only was he an avid gamer, but he also listened quite well to the community. When we asked for a linux version, he actually provided a few months later. (unfortunately no one ever used it.)
Apparently the fee is $20 FOR LIFE! I still have my old registration code somewhere I think. I may dig it out and give kali a try once again. (I myself haven't played it in about 6 years.)
I'm fairly certain it's not *that* simple -- nothing ever is.
Selling the rights for a flat fee would be criminally stupid on the part of the original developer/publisher or MacSoft's part. There would be some shared reward, more like:
$500,000 up front for the rights,
then $2 per unit for the first 100,000 units,
then $4 per unit for the next 100,000 units,
and $5 per unit for all other units.
Shared profit, mitigated risk.
I'm also sure there's lots and lots of review to ensure that the Mac product/version faithfully reproduces the experience. No one would simply sign away their IP to MacSoft, where MacSoft would then have total control.
That review of the final product costs money and time, both of which are seldom in simultaneous supply from both publisher and original developer.
I believe that Mac fans should hitch their wagon to Linux, and argue for Linux/Posix versions, where the Mac version in an emulated/unix native mode. At least then the breakdown of the market isn't 98-2, it's anywhere from 90-10 to 75-25, and then you're talking about a large enough segment of the market to matter to the publishers.
If Mac ports were free (or purely profitable), every game would have one. The fact that every game doesn't yields one of the following conclusions:
1. There's a conspiracy against the Mac as a gaming platform; or
2. Developers and publishers are too stupid to take free money; or
3. The original hypothesis is flawed.
My money's on #3, but Brent Sienna's is on #1.
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....
Steam is far more than just a server browser; It's a content delivery system. Yes, it has had problems in the past, but they're all ironed out now (I don't know anyone personally that still has issues with it, at least), and automatic updates takes away the annoying process of finding out about a patch and finding a place to download it. Steam takes care of all that automatically. Faster updated also means exploits are around for much less time before being fixed... A huge boon to online gaming. Cheaters suck.
Love sees no species.
It seems strange to see me write that as a subject, because I'm really not a Warcraft or Starcraft fan, but Blizzard has historically made pretty darn good quality games. And they have a tendency to support the Mac for many of their titles too, which I think is a nice bonus.
I own a Powerbook G4 (latest model), but I don't really game on it, nor did I buy it for that reason. But a company that's willing to support what I consider in general to be a superior OS gets plus marks from me. Windows as an OS pretty much sucks, but all the gaming hardware and software development happens there. So I have a PC that gets used almost exclusively for gaming and very little else. Meanwhile, I get my email (virus free) on the Mac, surf the web on the Mac, do shell scripting on the Mac. Hell, I even compiled our custom BSD tools at work for my Mac just so I can run them off my mactop if I want to. Flexibility is beautiful. And you still can't beat a Mac for creative applications like graphics, video and music. You can get by doing that on a PC, but on a Mac, you're in the groove.
Each Platform has it's strengths and weaknesses. That's why I run a huge variety at home. It keeps my skills up and my employability higher. Since I have a PC for gaming, I shouldn't really care if company X supports the Mac or Linux, and I don't expect them to. But when they do, that scores big points with me. And when a company tries to weasel their way in to a large percentage of games as a standard and fails to be platform agnostic, especially after supporting multi platform, that gets my ire up.
And it didn't help that I bought the useless lifetime subscription to GameSpy3D only to have them create the same thing more or less in the 'new' GameSpy Arcade and try to charge me for it AGAIN. They're slime.
Uh. Users aren't ON Gamespy. Gamespy is a server browser. Another tool can find and connect to the same servers that Gamespy uses.
I personally can't stand Gamespy. I REALLY hate games that bundle Gamespy - but it's the free version complete with ads. So I get to watch ads to play the game I spent $50 on.
The problem I can see is if the embedded browsers using Gamespy stop working when it pulls Mac support.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
The Mac port software houses will not touch, with a ten foot pole or otherwise, any game that they do not believe will be profitable on the Mac platform. This is why not everything gets ported to the Mac.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
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.
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.
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.
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
I've thought about this for a while. Why don't game companies or shareware game developers develop an open protocol? That way, you don't have the problem of some company screwing you after you've developed your game. -- TheMadRedHatter
while(1)
{
}
Ah, the story of life.
"I own both a Dual 1.8 G5"
and... a toaster?
oh I remeber so everyone can either
a) point at the idiot who misspelled and laugh b) point at the gramernazi and laugh c) laugh d) what was the first one again?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
No. This is incorrect. Gamespy support in Mac games that have already purchased a license will continue to work. Gamespy is contractually obligated to support them for the life of the product. They said so themselves, so I'm not just speculating.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
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."
When you're rushing me with Zerglings you're rushing a "Mac gamer." ...and when you're playing a game less than six years old, you're playing against a "PC gamer."
I'm sure that you will find a lot of xbox owners who wish that gran turismo 4 was available for them.
Bottles.
Listen, if you are really interested in gaming, you get a Windows PC
You miss spelled game console.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The whining is the only reason that Mac has a somewhat decent game library. Mac users are loud, but they back it up with $$$. And there's certain things (Half-Life port being cancelled right before release) that deserve to be whined about.
Compare this to Linux users -- Oh Quake III for Linux was delayed two weeks so I had to buy the Windows version, the bastards.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
There's a little more to it than that. At LAN parties we have a pretty good mix of platforms, and the only games that get played are ones we can all play together.
The knock on effect of stopping Mac support on a game tracker for us is to stop 2 windows users per mac user from playing the game too.
Cross-platform support is a important feature in this kind of networking product. If they drop support for any used platform then the numbers for all the others will suffer too.
Don't blame me - this
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.
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...
I like playing Neverwinter Nights on Linux, and, given that Atari now supports Linux on two of its blockbuster games (UT2004 and NWN), I would say it will continue without problems, given that, from what I have seen, GameSpy is just a server locater in NWN, and the actual server has been ported to linux. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but would it not be easier to port from Windows->Linux x86 than from Windows->Mac, because it's on the same platform? Well, anyway, I really don't care about Macs because, even most Mac users admit that Macs are bad for games, and they use them for multimedia. But I do care about linux, because games are the one thing standing between linux and wider acceptance IMHO, and it would be a shame to lose games and developers that we already have on our side.
I stand corrected. I am wondering if games like America's Army will still be playable if you have to connect to updated servers...
That was always a problem with games like Quake 3. The Mac patch would be behind the PC patch by a week or so, and you would be out in the cold until the patch came out.
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
Sorry. Forgot to include the gaming box in that sentence, later alluded to in the post. 10-4.
...unless you're playing WoW, or Unreal Tournament 2004, etc.
xfire has become (on the pc platform) the ideal solution... hopefully they will port it to the mac
man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren
Yeah, both devices process in parallel.
"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..."
It's the same for me. I've gotten sick of dealing with drivers, and Direct X versions on the PC and with what I saw as a general drop in quality of Japanese console games.
I have improved my gaming experience by restricting my PC gaming to games by Blizzard, because Blizzard has never done less than comepletely exceed my expectations. On the console side I've swapped my PS2 for an XBox so I can play my Bioware games on the couch and use XBox live for those rare fighting games where the programmers didn't get sloppy like Capcom and SNK seem to be doing now. I don't buy anything that I haven't already played or read reviews of, period. Sure I play a lot fewer games now, but I also waste a lot less time and money on the sitty ones.
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