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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
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.
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.
Maybe now that Console games are starting to get dumbed down and crippled to run on phones the console players will finally understand the frustration PC Gamers have been going through for the last 10 years or so.
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.
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
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.
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.
T-shirts. Kickstarter people always want t-shirts.
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.
Yes, for some basic MP games like BF1942, that's works reasonably well (and even then many of the "good" servers were hosted by companies getting some advertising/publicity, like nVidia, etc)
It most definitely won't for a MMPRPG like WoW though, where almost all of the complexity is in the servers.