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GameSpy's New Owners Begin Disabling Multiplayer Without Warning
New submitter OldTimeRadio writes "Over the last month, both game publishers and gaming communities alike were surprised to find their GameSpy multiplayer support suddenly disabled by GLU Mobile, who purchased GameSpy from IGN this August. Many games, including Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Swat 4, Sniper Elite, Hidden and Dangerous 2, Wings of War, Star Wars: Battlefront are no longer able to find (and in some cases even host) multiplayer games. While games like Neverwinter Nights are still able to directly connect to servers if players know the IP address, less-fortunate gamers expressed outrage on GLU Mobile's 'Powered by GameSpy' Facebook page. In an open letter to their Sniper Elite gaming community today, UK game developer Rebellion explained it was helpless to change the situation: 'A few weeks ago, the online multiplayer servers for Sniper Elite were suddenly switched off by Glu, the third-party service we had been paying to maintain them. This decision by Glu was not taken in consultation with us and was beyond our control. We have been talking to them since to try and get the servers turned back on. We have been informed that in order to do so would cost us tens of thousands of pounds a year — far in excess of how much we were paying previously. We also do not have the option to take the multiplayer to a different provider. Because the game relies on Glu and Gamespy's middleware, the entire multiplayer aspect of the game would have to be redeveloped by us, again, at the cost of many tens of thousands of pounds.""
I always thought GameSpy was bigger brand than this. So much you learn from gaming.
Twatted? Is there a term for when a company decides to make more money at the expense of all of their customers? If not, now seem as good a time as any to coin one!
write your own master servers, and modify the client to work with your own authentication mechanism
http://tribesnext.com
Last is the new first.
Rebellion (and others) hitched their wagon to some proprietary technology without having long term contracts in place. Shame on them.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I suppose in the future, developers will think twice before using gamespy.
Unfortunately, this move has ended the matchmaking capability of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the last title of the series before Microsoft fired ACES Studio, this seems a great shame, as the game still had well over 100 people using the service at any given moment, and Microsoft is unlikely to foot the bill for a premium service considering their abandoned support of the title. Thankfully there is also a direct connect system whereby a user enters an IP address, but this just isn't as effective for the community at large. I'll be the first to admit that from the get-go there were many bugs with the system, with GameSpy and ACES passing the blame between each other, and eventually getting nowhere, but it allowed thousands of like-minded enthusiasts to meet and form lasting relationships, and feel it will be sorely missed.
"Because the game relies on Glu and Gamespy's middleware"
See, this is your problem right here. Not the middleware part per.se, but the idea that the middleware is ALSO locked to a service outside of your control should have disqualified it immediately. You wouldn't use a video codec for which you don't have have a Free source code decoder, right?!
Oh... well, I guess we've learned TWO things here today.
Who could have called that happening?
Well, besides cortchety old Richard Stallman. Nobody listens to him.
If your going to use a another company infrastructure make sure your contracts have an exit plan. This reminds me of Gree killing OpenFeint. I wonder if there is a connection.
Tons of games use gamespy for multiplayer. This is devastating.
It seems like a huge major shuffling of media sources has gone around behind the scenes, even apple itunes 11, youtube, and windows 8 have all been raped and dumbed down.
What strikes me is the company is called GLU Mobile.
It seems to me that we are being prepped for our new "Mobile" interfaces, everything has to be focus'd and geared towards phones now. Everything is becoming crippleware because it needs to support the cheep dime a dozen phones circulating the market.
I hate to say it but stuff like gamespy should still be focus'd towards PC enthusiasts. I hope they learn their lesson and loose their business aquizition.
But it is most likely just to aquire the "IP" and trademarks of gamespy and they dont really care about the service, just owning the name.
They being at least in this case GLU mobile, which I wouldnt be suprised if it was just a front for others.
Never develop your programs based on a service that can die at any point. Even if it is millions of years.
Be it the "Cloud" or middleware like this, never do it. Ever.
The ability to be able to just take your multiplayer away from a game-host and to another, or even replace it with a decentralized version, is much better than a part of the game that then becomes impossible to play without serious changes to the back-end or an emulated server that would technically probably break the law since you would be replicating Gamespy servers. (I'm not sure, would that be?)
Also, ALWAYS develop a game with local play in mind. That should be the first thing to develop, care about game hosting later.
Not only does it make it considerably easier to develop it, it also lets you easily rip out old code and place in new code to deal with internet-hosted games.
Oh well.
Gee, it's almost like if you put your hosting in the hands of a third-party, you're hostage to arbitrary price increases.
Huh, who could have imagined that?
Games that rely on external MP servers are doomed. There is no incentive for a publisher to keep the multiplayer service up and running beyond the point at which it becomes an ongoing expense, and not an incentive for new purchasers of the game.
Once a game is obsolete, or superseded by a new one, the cost of maintaining a server is no longer something that a company wants to bear. If the company is purchased at some point, especially by the kinds of video game concerns that operate in this day and age, there is almost no chance of an old game retaining support.
Tribes 2 suffered this fate, but due to an extremely loyal fanbase, was patched and is now back in operation. Bitching to a company that clearly doesn't care won't help (because YOU AREN'T BUYING THEIR NEW GAMES!) so it falls upon the community, if it exists, to pick up the slack.
However, let this be a lesson to people who heavily invest their time and energy into multiplayer games as a hobby: DON'T TRUST GAME COMPANIES TO TAKE CARE OF YOU ONCE THEY HAVE YOUR MONEY! They are in it to make a sheckel, not to make you happy. Once they have their geld they're done with you.
Perhaps this is a good time for people to reflect on the idea of open-source gaming, because at least you can always start a new master server as a last resort.
Well, probably using kickstarter is the way to get funding to redevolop your hosting software.
Tens of thousands of pounds is well inside the range that you can get from kickstarter. Some game developers got a million or two. So give it a try.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Rubbing it in our faces huh? You can stop it Richard. We all know it is you.
Gamespy is a curse chunk of shit bloatware that has scarred the PC gaming landscape since the win 9x days. Let their new owners piss their customers off, and maybe we will all win.
lol > implying that any game that uses gamespy is worth playing
last time something tried to install gamespy on one of my machines was like .... 5 years ago
Depends on the cost but they could do a kickstarter to transition the games to something else. If there is absolutely no money left then they should open source these games.
And with one push of a button, one company effective killed a community Jack Thompson has been trying for years.
But then again, the copyright still is controlled.
And if you were to infringe on that copyright, up to $3/4 million will be charged as "losses" due to it.
Apparently, it's still worth a lot.
Or nothing.
But the choice of which it is is being made ad-hoc.
Perhaps this is a good time for people to reflect on the idea of open-source gaming, because at least you can always start a new master server as a last resort.
Or possibly consider investing all that time and energy in a different hobby. You'll notice that the cross stitching community is never in an uproar about DRM and failed middleware. They have something to show for their effort because they make something. Just sayin'.
Either way it sounds like they just need a few elephants, that would fulfill the tens of thousands of pounds.
Back when there were tons of problems with Borderlands multiplayer after launch (due to shitty GameSpy), my friends I shifted to GameRanger. Sadly it doesn't seem like too many games that are on that list are listed on the GameRanger supported game list, but it still is worth checking out.
Of course, there's no problem with relying on third parties to provide access to games that you've purchased. I mean, STEAM will be around forever to allow us to play all those games that phone home. Right?
The source port of Doom was missing sound because the original Linux version used a non-free component licensed from a third party. Fans rewrote that.
Lost a game we have been playing weekly for years myself altho it has been a couple months now for Flatout2 :(
But, not going with gamespy may have turned out even worse as the publisher went away years ago. No idea who has been paying up to this point if anyone.
Gamepsy has the infrastructure for this already and many of these games aren't even a blip on their radar. Seems like the good will just keeping them up might be worth it. How much can it really cost them to do matchmaking for a game with a couple hundred players max? Article mentioned a huge price increase so someone was paying on that game but i wonder if many of these were simply left running as suggested above. Gamespy may have been providing some freebies that new owners aren't willing to.
Some people are trying to connect thru Tunngle or another LAN simulator, including a number of us playing Flatout2.
PS...who does the message of the day thing and what are they smoking...."My Aunt MAUREEN was a military advisor to IKE & TINA TURNER!!" wtf?
It seems to me that we are being prepped for our new "Mobile" interfaces, everything has to be focus'd and geared towards phones now.
Heck, even oil giant Exxon has gone mobile.
Gamespy's Facebook page is particularly amusing, as someone keep parroting the line back to angry gamers that, despite Gamespy's logos being plastered all over the game, they aren't responsible for continuing to provide the online service, and gamers should 'reach out' the the game publishers... and then there's the not-so-subtle pot shot at publishers for being stingey and 'choosing not to support' the games.
It's hilarious - while it may be techically accurate - 95% won't understand, or care to understand, the difference, and will continue to blame Gamespy. The publishers, of course, will be only to happy to let Gamespy take the fall.
Having shredded Gamespy's goodwill, I have only one thing to ask: Would you say that was $2.8m well spent, Glu?
FGD 135
Never develop your programs based on a service that can die at any point.
Such as the Internet? Or electricity? (See Dies the Fire or NBC's Revolution or even the real world during armed conflict.)
Also, ALWAYS develop a game with local play in mind.
By this do you mean LAN multiplayer or same-screen multiplayer with two to four gamepads plugged into one PC? Now that Steam has the Big Picture launcher, more people will be setting up gaming PCs in the living room, which could be great for games in inherently same-screen multiplayer genres such as party games, fighting games, and cooperative platformers.
Have a gamespy proxy, that pretends to be gamespy, but can convert each and every packet to the new server system.
It should be possible, have local firewall redirect to a proxy translator to a new server.
Possible?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Any market for a 3rd party middleware that can be used with other services?
Anyone got API docs, or want to reverse-engineer the Gamespy middleware?
Perhaps a couple gamedevs could concentrate on that instead of rewriting their game :-)
Is there a free middleware that would do similar things?
If the answer is 'no' (or if whatever there is isn't large enough to be useful,) then a developer has the choice of either using a closed service with a solid history or rolling their own and entering a very costly "not invented here" cycle with all of the attendant bugs and crap to deal with that could have been avoided.
Nobody's going to use a fly-by-night company to host important parts of their project to be sure.. but GameSpy and IGN have been around for years and years and nobody could have foreseen such problems 5-10 years ago!
The answer is "no". The GameSpy platform provided several things:
(1) Matchmaking
(2) Centralized storage of user generated content
(3) Cross-platform support
(4) Player statistics/leaderboards
(5) Discussion communities
(6) Centralized identity for multiple games
(7) Third party hosting
(8) Scalability
#1 is not actually that valuable, unless you are into PVP games; I'm not, but I could see it being an issue for a lot of the slop games that are out there.
#6 is more valuable to the players than it is to the game companies, since they'd want to tie you into playing them with no portal to other detinations, but it's a tolerable trade-off.
The rest of them add value, and aren't easily replicated. There certainly aren't open APIs for this stuff, as a single package, and a company that wanted to monetize as much as possible be silly to offer such a package for direct licensing, without them at least owning the comunities and the centralized identities for marketing purposes.
How can you as a developer choose to rely on a third party organization for your livelihood, AND fail to choose to get a signed SLA, contract period, and guarantee of renewal for a certain period at price $X, before agreeing to start purchasing from a service provider?
You are shooting yourself in the foot. Don't bet your livelihood on a vendor, you don't have a solid agreement with.
Don't buy from a vendor, if their going away will have significant cost, unless you protect yourself against that cost.... either by insuring against it, or having a signed contract, that the Vendor will have to repay you the cost.
My only grip about many games, legit or pirated, is that stupid stupid stupid MOFO dickfucks, who still think people run on 1024x768 or 1280x1024 screens, but are TOO dumb, or TOO POOR, to even know that every one has a 16:9 tv , at 1366x768 or 1920x.
Hey Game coders, how about you just use the same res as what the desktop has. Get a clue bozos.
You dont have to test for all 1 million resolution combinations, just 4:3 and 16:9 and 2:1 and smart auto adjusting for everything else.
(Stupid asses at EA, im pointing fingers are you ex-3dworld coders, who didnt grow up with tvs)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You mean like they already do?
Fuckwit.
If you were neither expecting nor prepared for Glu to do this then either they are in breach of contract or your contract with them doesn't say what you thought it said (much worse; go and kick legal's ass).
However, as others have articulated better above, looking to another company for a server solution is a sensible division of labour but giving said company the power to instantly bring you to your knees at a whim is almost criminally foolish.
Bitching to a company that clearly doesn't care won't help (because YOU AREN'T BUYING THEIR NEW GAMES!)
But if enough people are playing the old games still, they don't have to go through the expense of making new ones. They could use the PBS model: "Attention valued players of $GAME, our servers and bandwidth cost money, and Mitt Romney threatened to eat Big Bird for Thanksgiving. Please donate $2,000,000 so that we can keep the servers running for another year." When the money stream finally dries up, they can let it die with very little ill-will.
Someone find crt and give him a hard kick in the nuts on behalf of gamers everywhere.
How did they test the game in house before it got released? They have to have tested it LAN only mode.
No damn coder in any time should hardcode bloody IPs in his code. Even then firewalls can redirect.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
They don't care about ill-will because gamers have shown time and again that they are totally spineless and will accept any abuse dished out by game companies.
Personally I'm not complaining, these companies have no obligation to continue providing servers at their own expense for games that no longer provide revenue. I guess my scorn is reserved for the gamers that think they deserve something out of these companies.
Using Gamespy middleware is like using Microsoft RT instead of Android o iOS.
You should have used Steam middleware. Now you deserve to go out of business.
How did they test the game in house before it got released?
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Thanks.
nt
There are plenty of superior commercial offerings with shiny interfaces and there are plenty of technically superior ways without the shiny interface, such as scp or sftp. Due to some fucking stupid security flaws in dropbox (notably lack of separation and problems with revoking access) in some ways it's technically inferior to where FTP was TWENTY YEARS AGO.
I just think it's amazing that GameSpy is even worth buying by anyone at this point. Besides their matchmaking and server services, they used to have the most up-to-date, useful network of gaming sites out there (for example, PlanetHalfLife, which I used to work on in its heyday and now it hasn't been updated in five months). FilePlanet also used to be indispensable. Now it all seems pretty damn worthless, which is unfortunate.
bithosting ROFL
This is what happens when you rely on third parties.. they go out of business, stop caring or up the price cause they can and your screwed with no recourse.
Even console games say it rather plainly right on the box they can shut down multi-player whenever they feel like it.
Let's all chant it together. How many times do we need to learn the same lesson?
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Well... Time to use facebook system against them. They currently have 881 likes. Time for all those people that "liked" their page to unlike it. This would be one easy way to send them and their advertisers a message.....
--
Time is on my side
I mean, after they purchased GameSpy Technologies. Think about it: They shut off the servers without notifying even the publishers, much less the players. They seem to indicate from the Facebook responses that they haven't actively contacted the publishers and in the one case where a publisher did "reach out" to GLU Mobile, they present the publisher with an extremely prohibitive fee system. Therefore, it would seem to me that GLU Mobile has no intention in the first place of actually continuing support, whether publishers want to continue it or not. They just wish to give the appearance that it was an option. I have every reason to believe, based on their actions, that this was their plan all along, after purchasing GameSpy Technologies.
Cloud owners: 1
PC/console owners: 0
Handing over your $80 for 'cloud-enabled' games is paying someone to be boss of your leisure-time. Why do people continue to buy cripple-ware?
They don't care about ill-will because gamers have shown time and again that they are totally spineless and will accept any abuse dished out by game companies.
Perhaps it has more to do with people who've grown accustomed with these things being the norm? An analog to the situation in the states with the TSA and air travel. It is the new norm and for a new generation it is all they've known. Don't forget to buy the DLC, kid.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I don't like stallman out of various reason, but moer and more I get the uneasy feeling he is a broken clock which is right 11 hours a day.
We'll be on it just as soon as someone releases a hacking tool that requires us to do nothing more than click the "hack system" button, before sitting around waiting to be arrested.
I meant to moderate it "Overrated".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This article talks about the protocol
http://www.protocolinfo.org/wiki/GameSpy
If it only costs 10's of thousands why not do a KIckStarter project to get the funding. If you have a large loyal following it should be no problem to get the money. Expand this idea to develop a peer to peer massive multiplayer system that would not need any central servers. Now that would be a very cool concept I could get behind. It would open up the gaming environment taking it away from the control of the mega media monopoly. As long as you have interested players you have a network that no one or no corporation can shut down.
I was playing Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl lately and one day it just started to crash on startup. It took a lot of trial and error to finally discover from wireshark that it was hitting the gamespy server on startup and the response causing it to crash. This happens even when running singleplayer.
The game is well known for being rather buggy, but it would have been nice if gamespy caused the server to not respond rather to send a response that causes it to crash. Yanking the network cable, firewall rules or host file editing can get it back running again.
These kinds of problems will be happening more often as more often as new games depend on "the cloud" and DRM servers to operate.
It may be the norm but we don't have to accept it. I stopped flying because I will not be treated like a terrorist.
We have only several hundred players, only dozens are active. Additionaly there is no need to host our game because Battlestations: Midway online games are hosted by one of players. Additionaly we have no option to join IP or whatever (sometimes games contains options like a: "Connect to IP or Join IP". In short, GameSpy or nothing. All we need is master server with the list of registered servers (usually we have 1, 2 max 3, for the long periods we have 0) which can connect us. I imagine that the traffic we re require is similar to the small mailbox without attachments. And they cut this out....
I do not claim to know much about how computers work, but for some games, like Neverwinter Nights (Those that can connect via direct IP address), couldn't someone make a master server list simmilar to what happened with Freelancer? It was some download you ran that kind of faked a master server, and it allowed users to see all the servers who had given their IP addresses to whoever created said download. I was able to go from "I can't see any servers and can't play boo hoo" to "Hey, look, Star Wars RP server!" Once again, I don't claim to know how multiplayer works, or whatever, but hopefully someone with more knowledge than myself could make these little workarounds and keep these old legacy games around. I love NWN, and Freelancer, and many other Gamespy games. (I know, Freelancer was all Microsoft stuff, I'm pretty sure it wasn't gamespy). I hope we can keep playing these games even with everything that happens with Gamespy.
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Go to http://rabbitcage.dip.jp/ for IP addresses for games which are always up! Sometimes they are empty but we had 9 ppl on at the same time yesterday!
Not sure anyone will see this as it's nearly a week later. I've just added support for Sniper Elite on GameRanger, so it can be played online again easily. More rescues are still to come...
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games