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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.""
Who could have called that happening?
Well, besides cortchety old Richard Stallman. Nobody listens to him.
It already happens ALL the time. We have a vendor for a CRM that just shut down the ODBC connection that they were implicitly charging us for. We went in to renew the contract and they said "Oh yea, ODBC is deprecated. You wont be able to connect to it after January 1st" to which we said "So how are we supposed to do reporting on the data?" and they replied "We have a new reporting service. You tell us which reports you need written and we'll charge you by the hour." As far as my employer is concerned "The cloud" is dead. The majority of cloud services we've dealt with have turned into extortion rackets in recent years. Upper management didn't see it coming but they're definitely on to it now. You can only sign a contract for so long... and once it's up they have you by the short hairs.