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GameSpy Multiplayer Shutting Down, Affecting Hundreds of Games
An anonymous reader writes "For over a decade, GameSpy has provided and hosted multiplayer services for a variety of video games. GameSpy was purchased in 2012, and there were some worrying shutdowns of older servers, which disabled multiplayer capabilities for a number of games. Now, the whole service is going offline on May 31. Some publishers are scrambling to move to other platforms, while others are simply giving up on those games. Nintendo's recent abandonment of Wi-Fi games was a result of their reliance on GameSpy's servers. Bohemia Interactive, developers of the Arma series, said the GameSpy closure will affect matchmaking and CD-key authentication."
No matter who it is, how long it has been around, or what the service is... if it is a cloud service it will one day go away.
Gamespy was the worst service ever. Client integratio was always atrocious, latency was horrific and any game that used a third party service like gamespy didn't have a large enough playebase to support online multiplayer.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Never got it to work anyway.
I opened every port, changed every setting, fiddled with everything I could, never got even a lobby or anything going at all on the Gamespy games I have installed.
Really weird because ANYTHING non-Gamespy just worked - whether Steam, Windows Live, some company-specific online lobby or - indeed - any TCP/IP based service whatsoever.
Never got to the bottom of it, so just treated all Gamespy-based games as being offline games.
Really wanted to play silly things like Age of Booty online but just never got the chance. It won't be missed.
Not when it came out .....
I miss the good old IPX days...
Yea, everything was so much better back before GameSpy was around and we used to use.... nothing. I'm going to guess that you didn't play online games back in the 90's pre GameSpy, the service was pretty much revolutionary. Previously, online "matchmaking" consisted of sharing server IP addresses on forums and IRC.
Agreed ... GameSpy didn't evolve and became bloated over time but when it first came out, there was nothing like it.
I used to run the Gamespy server lists, back in the day, pre-quakeworld. It didn't require much in resources, really, but when we changed from planetquake to gamespy, a bunch of programs stopped working. It was pretty bad.
Hopefully, the games that are not abandon-ware can move to a different URL provided by the community. But if it is abandon-ware, then they're basically hosed.
Sadly, I considered this era ended years ago. oh well.
Flight Simulator X was pretty awesome, but multiplayer sucked because of GameSpy.
And like most things in life, the more basic solution still works, while the do-everything-for-you-automated-process does not.
GameSpy was garbage anyway. Their closure will bring about better things.
You can't blame them entirely, most of the fault was probably on the side of the game developers themselves, and not on GameSpy, who probably struggled a whole lot to make it work as well as it did among such a massive plethora of game development companies.
I'll never forget the days of playing Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear on MPlayer, though. Those were good times.
Not the first or the last, Total Entertainment Network (TEN) also went the way of the dinosaur.
Just another in a long, long line of matchmaking services that have closed and rendered years of games worthless (Heat.net, WON, etc.). The GameSpy closure will, in particular, ruin the enjoyment of hundreds of games.
Take note, developers. Do not export a crucial part of your game to a third party and trust that it will be around forever.
Hurray, Arma. So let's spend a bunch of time and money on a game and then cheap out and ship out our CD authentication to a third party aaaaaaaaaand it's gone and nobody can play our multi-million dollar game. Good job, guys.
This reminds me of The Witcher Enhanced Edition. They use some sort of DRM that uses a special fake device driver. It doesn't work at all with Windows 7. So they had to release a patch that's a bit hard to find on their website that just removed the DRM completely. But for a time, nobody could play it. What a bunch of greedy idiots.
I'm the developer of GameRanger, a PC/Mac multiplayer online gaming service supporting over 600 games that has been running since 1999. Not very well known due to being Mac-only until late 2008, but just hit 5 million registered members last month mostly from word of mouth. Many of these games are ex-GameSpy or already had their existing services shut down long ago.
I've been trying to reach out to any affected developers and publishers, as I'm well-positioned to be able to help out. My only interest is in keeping these games alive, no matter how small the player base is. I'm not sure if I can help with the console games; that may depend on Glu (I've reached out to them as well).
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
I don't get why a company gets bought out, then shortly afterwards gets shut down. Often the one thing that gives the company value is what gets shut down. Are the purchasing companies not aware that their purchase isn't of value after the fact?
kali was pretty fun way back when :) seemed to cater more to the RTS crowd (warcraft 2) though.
There were other options like Django, MPlayer, TEN, Kali, and Kahn. QuakeSpy/GameSpy became the dominant service.
Three cheers for DRM! This is why I only play older games. I know that I will always be able to play them in the future (as long as dosbox and wine still work).
I used that service when I was playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Man that game was great. I wish EA would do a reboot of that one. It deserve it imho. But they should introduce a mod system since the game is heavily modded on servers. it's actually one of the games that is still played while being old today. To me, this game aged well.
muhaha
I predicted this years ago. Just like I predict EA Origins will fail and what little games that rely on Origin will need to be changed, or more likely they will simply go away.
This is why the developer community should always build in capability to directly host games and use Steam.
They pay to destroy the competition.
The price paid is what they think they'll gain over a period of a couple of years, plus a bit of a sweetener to the owners to let the deal pass through.
At the purchase point everyone is babbling inane PR crap, how wonderful this is and how nothing changes, and how now there are resources to do all new things and EXPAND and GROW and unicorns and kittens and so on. This is understandable. Wouldn't you say so too, if you got a few hundred million dollars?
The owners chug along for a few years at most until they either go "looking for new challenges" or get another managerial position within the new organization.
In either case the original business is long gone. Whether the world as a whole benefitted is unclear, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Rely on 3rd party services unless you absolutely must, it doesn't matter what inconvenience it may bring, reliance on something external always meants you'll get shafted as the ultimate consequence, there are no exceptions.
"Yea, everything was so much better back before GameSpy was around and we used to use.... nothing."
HEAT.NET
TEN.COM
GameSpy wasn't the only thing around back then. I'm going to guess you never actually played games very seriously.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Previously, online "matchmaking" consisted of sharing server IP addresses on forums and IRC.
At least that worked. Being shuttled into GameSpy when they bought earlier multiplayer services like Heat made getting those games running orders more difficult.
But multiplayer in the last 90s and early 2000s SUCKED, as almost every game assumed a computer was attached directly to the Internet connection with no NAT and no firewall. Diablo 2 was amazing in its simplicity: if you didn't want to use Battle.net, you could use the direct TCP/IP method. Just poke one port in your firewall and it just worked. None of this "forward 10 UDP ports" idiocy. None of this "the IP address of your computer is embedded in the data stream and the other game tries to connect to that, but your machine is NATted so that will never work" bullshit. And none of that Microsoft DirectX networking idiocy. Now NAT and firewalls are everywhere because everyone has multiple devices connected to their broadband and no one uses IPv6.
We expect that they'll do what they always do when they have a hardware/software problem - call a techie friend for help or pay someone $50 to fix it for them.
You can play a few newer games too. Anything you can get on GOG will be DRM free. I always check there before Steam now: even for a $3 game, I'd rather get the DRM version if it exists.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
*the DRM-free version ...
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Mmmm.. QuakeSpy. TF, go! Ping 4 concurrent servers, filter for pings below 300, load from x, y, and z server list. Come back 15 minutes later.
Amazon Video still has DRM, that relies on old PlaysforSure servers for video you buy.
Games can be every bit as meaningful and artful as movies, film, sculpture, painting, photography, digital art, etc. However, art is not born with a needless death sentence. Some art is made to be fleeting and rejoices in the temporary nature of our entropic existence. However, this is somewhat rare, and most rarely still is it a necessity of art works that they destroy themselves unless a huge stream of revenue is ever present. If games are to be as respected as art and worthy of cultural investment by our governments, as many claim they are, then they must be born as are the majority of all other art: With an everlasting spark of creativity, not in a self extinguishing fit of greed.
If the online game does not come with a stand alone server or simply allow reading of companion players IP addresses from a text file, then you do not have the whole game. When forced into the parasitic bond of planned obsolescence even the most artful of games will cease to be so, by definition. Those that leverage such artificial limitations as DRM authentication servers and do not grant the public a way to continue to experience the game for generations to come should NOT be considered art, and should not receive the benefit arts are afforded, such as grants from National Endowments for Arts. In contrast, if the games embrace everlasting eternal life then they perhaps types of "crowd funding" besides kickstarters can contribute to their success. If a game developer considers themselves an artist then I would recommend they stay away from publishers notorious for their poisoning of games with time release DRM venom. I can't see myself throwing a chunk of my creative potential into something destined to die and be forgotten.
Games that die needless deaths or suffer artificial online amputation are morned by appreciators of games as art. City of Heroes is a fine example. They remained profitable while newer attempts failed to do so, and this became an embarrassment to the studio; The monumental game became a monument to successive failures and it was killed to perhaps force folks to migrate to their new games. This is akin to burning precious paintings just so that future generations can not experience them. Games like Halo2 had their online features killed despite the machines only needing a list of IP addresses, and party chat on the new XBL friends with the game's logo next to their names; Halo3 had come out, and the goading to stop playing previous titles was quite obvious; Now you must repurchase it to play again online -- Ah, but that digital purchase doesn't work on the new Xbone. In addition to these TFA contains more examples and the recent history is rife with loss. If you think an expensive central server is required to list all the IP addresses of available game servers then take a look at how DHTs such as Bittorrent work. Anyone can modify a .torrent and add new trackers. Direct P2P links among all parties are established for voice chat in many online games anyway.
When in the midsts of some terrible stew many consider the situation "not so bad" since they can not make comparison with far brighter times ahead. Future historians will note that our Dark Ages were caused by DRM.
It may have sucked but it was the only way to play Klingon Academy multiplayer. It also brings me back to the old days of Americas Army which blow away the new versions even if you had to use gamespy to find all the available servers.
Gamespy was competition for nobody anymore. On the PC side of things, Steamworks dominates the market so completely at this point that removing Gamespy doesn't do anything. It's not like anybody was using it in current games anyway.
On the console side, the consoles themselves are getting progressively better about offering this stuff to games on their platform. There simply wasn't a lot of reason to use Gamespy for any game development in 2013 or 2014, which is probably why the list of games affected doesn't include a whole lot of even remotely current stuff.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well, thanks to the hard work of the software pirates of yore, this shouldn't be much of an issue. While many of them just wanted a free game, or the reputation of cracking the most games, or just worked with the joy of an engineer solving an interesting problem, at least some of them were probably working actively to free(libre) games... imagine if paintings expired with their painter, or (as many did) were lost when their painter's patron was deposed and his holdings sacked... imagine if movies stopped playing... frames fell out of order, audio garbled... when the original studios went under? They do to an extent... paintings and analog film decay or get lost... but unlike games there's no prohibition against restoring those original works, but rather a celebration of it... while the software pirates have to work in the shadows to keep old games playing, since their work is still technically illegal in the US... shame about that. (and not that stealing games just to save a buck is a good thing, game devs are under appreciated, and typically underpaid, the games usually being presented as the work of one master game designer... but cracking games to overcome DRM... to protect the consumer and cultural contribution against the short sightedness and/or budgetary concerns of studios... is most certainly a good thing.)
you were really only renting.
All multiplayer games should have the option to create and host your own games without relying on undisclosed hosting software.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm going to guess you never actually played games very seriously.
Whoa look out! We got a SERIOUS GAMER over here guys.
If it means the end of GameSpy Voice "chat" -- aka some people are silent and some people HAVE THE VOICE OF GOD -- I am okay with any other ripple effects.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
That is precisely why I refuse to buy games that require Steam or other online DRM services to play. The last game I purchased was Oblivion; love it, but you don't have to have a service to play it. Unreal Tournament is pretty good also but anyone with a fast connection can host that game without requiring a special service to play.
Good thing there is no alternative like xqf.
Fuck Gamespy (and I have a full gamespy paid subscription won via contest because I'm a badass old-school FPS player).
Not that anyone has been warning about DRM linked to servers being a failure. I wonder how much they are going to be sued for?
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Thank God!
I have hated GameSpy multiplayer service as long as I remember - from the start!
It's freaking crap and should have died ages ago.
With cloud-based stuff, you never know how soon plugs are going to get pulled.
On the plus side, people may become more aware and wary of what may happen when depending on online services so we may hopefully have more offline options in the future.
Uh, yea, been at it since 1992, when Cable modem first came out for Memphis.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I agree. The worst of it was that the companies apparently didn't know a damn thing about how the outsourced networking system worked and you had to dig through dozens of incorrect posts in forums where people basically waved dead chickens and sacrificed frogs until someone figured out what collection of ports you had to forward to make your server visible in the list AND joinable by other people.
These days you install hamachi, and as the saying goes, "now you have two problems".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If you download iTunes songs they have DRM unless you pay extra for the "iTunes Plus" service which makes each song more expensive.
Except iTunes Plus has reportedly been included in the price of music downloads for the past half decade.
Amazon will only let you download the files to a single authorized device.
That's news to me and my three authorized computers: one running Android 2.2, one running Android 4.4, and one running Windows 7.
Or, you know, I could just put a more traditional flavor of Linux on it.
Provided that Google still makes the unlocked bootloader available for download. The bootloader that ships on the device is locked to run only Chrome OS.
IPv6 on Itanium is the wave of the future!
Boxee hasn't had an update in forever because after they were bought, the Dev team was re-vectored. So some things that really should be fixed aren't and some things that could have been added now never will be. It *is* my TV source, so I will miss it when Netflix finally ceases to work or something comes along that means I have to get another box.
Really, it would be nice to see people develop these sorts of products with an idea to them having longevity, but no hardware manufacturer wants that.
Even content they are now trying to LICENSE to us for a time and in a particular format, rather than simply selling us the work to own (like books and games used to be) and that's a ridiculous model in my mind.
DRM-servers for many products will eventually go silent then everyone wanting to revisit old nostalgic movies and books will have to buy them again in some new format from a new provider. (legally, of course there are other non-legal options)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
If Google keeled over today, my email and docs would be a loss.
I have some of the docs backed up locally, but not all (got used to using the cloud, don't know an easy full-google-docs backup tech). If email went guts up... argh. I do try to pull the mail archive periodically, but it is absolutely huge now. Beyond that, if I lose tagging - very likely in an export/import to different tool scenaro - then I lose a massive amount of organization that helps me find individual collections of email in 15 years worth of heavy email traffic.
This is my biggest issue with these services - even if you can get the data out, you might not get all of it and some of the metadata (organizing data) might no longer be useful/available.
I'd really love to see more open standards in use for both the downloading of all of this sort of stuff but also being able to reuse it in a new product if there was a need. But Google doesn't want you to do that, really.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I'm afraid I have worked with Flash. If it is the solution, then you have an apocalyptic problem. I'd rather nail my head to a coffee table than ever have to work with Flash again.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
You aren't that bright are you? He's making fun of you.
You aren't very bright either, failing to see that I'm not letting his stupid jeer get in the way of facts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The most common one is the company still has a lot of good employees, and the buyer wants those.
Another common reason is that if the company has good credit you can buy them, borrow a bunch of money, pay yourself consultancy fees from the borrowed money and then let the company go bankrupt. It's called "Vulture Capitalism".
It also works if a company owns a lot of property. The sci-fi pulp magazines went out of business in the 80s because their distributor got bought out when somebody noticed they were sitting on a bunch of property that was undervalued. They bought 'em, sold the property and shut down the business, leaving the pulp mags without a distributor.
Sometimes too the companies have a bunch of money from investors and it's use it or lose it time. I think Facebook is here, and that's why they bought out Occulus Rift.
And occasionally it's just because the company is over valued. HP is currently in a lot of hot water with their stock holders for spending several billion on a company that was massively over valued.
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Thanks for the good times!!!
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