GameSpy Multiplayer Shutting Down, Affecting Hundreds of Games

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GameSpy Multiplayer Shutting Down, Affecting Hundreds of Games

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 4, 2014 @02:12AM from the things-you-may-no-longer-experience dept.

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."

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The Cloud! by glasshole · 2014-04-04 02:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:The Cloud! by rhsanborn · 2014-04-04 02:18 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We're hitting the age where some earlier services are starting to shut down, and that's actually a good thing. It will start a conversation about how much we're willing to trust to "the cloud" and what we're willing to make temporary. Many of us have Kindles, iPhones, Rokus that use content from providers not unlike GameSpy. We need to be willing to say out loud that ownership of these items is now temporary. The sellers of these items need to be more open about that as well.
2. Re:The Cloud! by Desler · 2014-04-04 02:22 · Score: 2
  
  Many of us have Kindles, iPhones, Rokus that use content from providers not unlike GameSpy. We need to be willing to say out loud that ownership of these items is now temporary.
  Since when did you ever have ownership of streamed music/movies/etc?
3. Re:The Cloud! by ledow · 2014-04-04 02:26 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You can replace "cloud service" with "service".
  Just about any business, service, or product you use you have to consider what happens if the company goes bankrupt. "But they'll never go bankrupt" is not an answer. You need to know what you'll do if they just go offline, now, today, and you never get your data back ever.
  If you haven't been working like that in your business since day one, you really need to consider your options. Whether it's a mobile phone provider, some VoIP service, your operating system vendor, your cloud services or - hell - your cleaners, your electrician or anything else, you owe it to yourself and your customers to have enough information to just carry on. Maybe with a blip. Maybe not 100% smooth and instant. But at least for business continuity purposes.
  Cloud is no different in this regard. I know of a bursar at a private school who questioned even things like in-house library services, window-cleaning companies (with long-term contracts) and IT support contracts on the basis of "What if you go bankrupt today?" It's a sensible question to ask - of them and of yourself - and vital for business continuity in anything the smaller of outfits.
  They will not tell you if they are going bankrupt until it's too late. Hell, we had an AV vendor go into administration. They didn't say a word and we only found out when it had been a while since our last signature update and went to their website.
4. Re:The Cloud! by Enry · 2014-04-04 02:32 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
  Kindle content can also be downloaded and saved separately but does require that the device is already authorized.
  In the case of e.g. Netflix, you never own the content, merely use of the content they provide for the time they have it.
  In the case of GameSpy, it's required to play online. It'd be like Steam or XBox Live being shut down.
5. Re:The Cloud! by JMJimmy · 2014-04-04 02:35 · Score: 2
  
  Couldn't agree more. Hell, my local win8 app installs are gone (or at least inaccessible) because I can't access the Microsoft Store - thanks cloud!
  Anyway, here's a list of games up to 2010 - some no longer rely on it but it's the best reference list I've been able to locate: http://www.poweredbygamespy.co...
6. Re:The Cloud! by glasshole · 2014-04-04 02:35 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I think these cloud services are a little different. You probably physically purchased games that are now unplayable because they don't have servers to connect to. Similarly if you bought a Chromebook and Google discontinued the Docs service you'd have purchased a very pretty brick.
7. Re:The Cloud! by SuricouRaven · 2014-04-04 02:41 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  That's the problem with clouds. Eventually, they rain.
8. Re:The Cloud! by glasshole · 2014-04-04 02:56 · Score: 2
  
  Totally, that is what you and I would do. But that isn't viable for every Chromebook consumer, or even the majority of them.
9. Re:The Cloud! by Enry · 2014-04-04 03:09 · Score: 2
  
  Did you just come out of a wormhole or something? Some of that might have been true 5 years ago, but none of it is now. There is some DRMd iTMS music that I purchased 10 years ago, but everything recently has been without DRM. I've been able to download from both Google Play and Amazon across multiple mobile and desktop/laptop devices.
10. Re:The Cloud! by Desler · 2014-04-04 03:11 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  No. If you download iTunes songs they have DRM unless you pay extra for the "iTunes Plus" service which makes each song more expensive
  Songs on iTunes haven't had DRM since 2009.
11. Re:The Cloud! by Anonymous Coward · 2014-04-04 03:13 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Actually, iTunes MP3's do NOT have DRM. Movie and TV shows are a different story, but the music is DRM free (by default, with no extra charge).
12. Re:The Cloud! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-04-04 03:15 · Score: 2
  
  He was talking about the hardware: you 'own' the Roku or whatnot; but if its utility relies on the existence of one or more providers (often, thanks to OMG PIRACY!, ones you can't change unless the vendor happens to be in a good mood), you could end up 'owning' a glorified brick tomorrow, since your hardware will just sit there plaintively crying for its mothership rather than doing anything useful.
13. Re:The Cloud! by praxis · 2014-04-04 05:59 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I got bitten when I tried to watch a movie I had purchased from Amazon in my hotel room in Canada. They were at least nice and allowed me to refund all of my digital purchases, which I did.
Nothing of value was lost by Ziggitz · 2014-04-04 02:17 · Score: 2

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.
GameRanger already supports many GameSpy games by Scott+Kevill · 2014-04-04 02:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

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).

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GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
1. Re:GameRanger already supports many GameSpy games by fustakrakich · 2014-04-04 03:40 · Score: 2
  
  Very nice... How long until you shut down? :-)
  Why do we need this stuff? I thought the internet was P2P...
  
  --
  “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why do companies buy then shutdown something by Jombieman · 2014-04-04 02:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?
1. Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something by Kardos · 2014-04-04 02:55 · Score: 2
  
  The value is less competition
2. Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something by Anonymous Coward · 2014-04-04 03:25 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  a) Always to eliminate competition
  b) Some part of the company bought is losing money
  c) Turns out the inhouse product is better and is replacing it (see A)
  You know what I find terrible? That we allowed companies like Autodesk, Adobe, and Microsoft to monopolize certain software, that it causes a "use or die" scenario.
  Autodesk should never have been allowed to purchase Maya after purchasing SoftImage XSI, as this allowed them to own 3 of 4 commercially used 3D modeling and animation programs out there.
  Adobe should never have been allowed to purchase Macromedia, as this allowed them to eliminate one competitor and destroy the one good thing (flash) that Macromedia was known for. In hindsight, if Adobe didn't, Microsoft or Apple would have, and one of them owning Macromedia would have been worse. It was also a betrayal of getting SVG into browsers.
  Microsoft Office, yes there are alternatives, but people still send Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files in emails with the assumption that the other person can read it.
  So seeing this issue with Gamespy, or developers integrating a little too snuggly with Steam means that at some point down the road, these games are simply going to not work without being hacked/fan-patched, thus ruining any integrity the game has for multiplayer. If it had any to begin with. The Wii/DSi/DS games don't have an option to make them work short of playing them in an emulator and emulating the gamespy servers. This is something that Nintendo in theory could do themselves.
  Before we allow companies to merge, we should be asking, what would happen if the company bought it only to shut it down. Not simply "is there more than one program that X company doesn't own that serves the same purpose?" Because that Autodesk thing really pisses off a lot of people inside the industry and out.
3. Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something by Spad · 2014-04-04 03:32 · Score: 2
  
  In situations where it's not blatantly trying to kill the competition, it's usually that someone unrelated to the industry in question buys a fairly popular but financially struggling service figuring "how hard can it be to make it profitable?" only to find out after a year or so that actually it's quite hard to make it profitable, which is why the previous owners couldn't do it, and now their options are to close it down or find some horribly insidious way to force money from its users, which invariably leads to a fairly quick death anyway a few months down the line.
4. Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something by Anrego · 2014-04-04 04:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Three big ones:
  1) kill the competition
  2) assets (physical, people, and lately the big one: patents/other IP)
  3) seemed like a good idea but quickly proves to be way less profitable than expected (will probably be the case when Dice eventually sells or kills slashdot).
5. Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something by IndustrialComplex · 2014-04-04 05:44 · Score: 2
  
  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?
  What is being purchased in a buyout doesn't have to be what was profitable to the original company. Consider the classic farm example.
  A farmer is making a living with a decent $10,000 yearly profit on his 100 acres. He provides the local community with fresh produce, pays his taxes, and is putting away a decent amount into his savings. By all accounts, his business is doing well. He then receives an offer to buy his farm, as-is, for $3,000,000. The farm is sold.
  However, the company that purchased the farm lets the equipment rust, the fields go fallow, and the barn collapse. Why would they purchase a profitable farm if all they were going to do is let weeds grow and shut it down. The answer comes later, when 400 future housing plots are identified for sale at $400,000 each. Turns out, while the farm was profitable, the land was worth MUCH more as a housing development. Rather than earn $10,000/year in profit through hard work, the purchasing company turned a $3,000,000 purchase into a $160,000,000 real estate deal.
  The farm could have continued, as it was making a profit, but it wasn't making nearly as much of a profit as it could have made. (not that I like farm's beind developed, but I think this is a good example to demonstrate why seemingly profitable enterprises get shut down after a buyout)
  
  --
  Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Re:IPX by stewsters · 2014-04-04 02:58 · Score: 2

A bit of googling: http://www.solemnwarning.net/i...
Re:And nothing of value was lost by rogoshen1 · 2014-04-04 03:03 · Score: 2

kali was pretty fun way back when :) seemed to cater more to the RTS crowd (warcraft 2) though.
GameSpy closure will affect CD-key authentication by Culture20 · 2014-04-04 03:06 · Score: 2

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).
Re:morons! by lgw · 2014-04-04 04:34 · Score: 3, Informative

And then they learned their lesson. They now run Good Old Games, 100% DRM free, and The Witcher (sequel something something) is the first AAA title to go DRM free on GOG.

--
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
the upside of piracy... by oneeyedziggy · 2014-04-04 05:30 · Score: 2

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.)