Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is different for a few reasons.
When you buy music from iTunes, Amazon, or Google Play you can download the content and store it locally without DRM.
No. If you download iTunes songs they have DRM unless you pay extra for the "iTunes Plus" service which makes each song more expensive. So there is an option to get the non-drmed version but I doubt very many of their customers understand the difference.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht...
Google does the following: Google Music will take control of playlists and hide any cloud-sync'd mp3s in a special folder with numbers for names (eg. 100.mp3, 101.mp3, 102.mp3, etc)
Amazon will only let you download the files to a single authorized device. There are ways around this, but again, most of their users wouldn't have a clue.
Long story short, if any of these companies drop their music service MOST of their customers would lose their songs. DRM or not.