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EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games
Last month Gamespy announced it would be shutting down at the end of May. Many game makers relied upon Gamespy for all of the multiplayer and online services related to their games, and there was a scramble to transition those games away from Gamespy. Now, Electronic Arts has decided it's not worth the trouble for older titles. They're terminating online support for a huge number of games. The game list includes: Battlefield 2, Crysis 1 & 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, and Star Wars: Battlefront 1 & 2. EA said, "As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles - where it's no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running."
I can still play quake 2 online whenever I want :)
Well then can we get the code for the server-side so we can run our own private servers to play the games we bought?
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Except these are offline games with a multiplayer component, which is rendered useless without the servers to host it. This is very different to the licensed MMORPG-type games.
"Thank you for playing our fine line of rental games. If you wish to continue playing, please upgrade to our latest game and continue paying your subscription fees in a timely manner."
--Regards,
Electronic Asshats
Good people go to bed earlier.
"As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles
So every EA online game will die when the figure on a spreadsheet drops below a certain threshold. Why not open source the server software rather than abandon it?
Trolling is a art,
> If they programmed it correctly
As a server admin, if this is your standard for correct server side programming, I've never seen a correctly programmed application in my entire 30 year career.
In my experience, server application migrations rarely function flawlessly across OS versions. Most of the time, major application modifications need to be made.
I agree with you on the server code, however. If they're going to abandon it, they might as well open source it.
Except that they are shutting down because gamespy is shutting down. They made the games with gamespy based matchmaking, so they would either need to change the games to use a different matchmaking service or get the source for the servers from gamespy (lol yea right).
...better than to buy or play and EA games. They were cool back when it was Larry Bird vs. Dr. J 1-on-1, or Pinball Construction Set. EA has sucked for so many years now, I'm baffled that any nerd or geek would ever give them money for a game. And that's WITHOUT getting in to all the labor offenses.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
If they programmed it correctly, migration to a new server would involve "rsync *.tar.gz . && tar xfz *.tar.gz" or something similar. There is no reason that needs to be complicated, so maintenance time should be minimal.
Yeah, good luck finding *anything* that's that simple.
Even moving the simplest possible website (just static files, nothing dynamic) to a new host is more work than that. (You could move the content itself with rsync or tar (though not with the command lines you gave), but the new server needs to be configured, the web server still needs to be set up, etc.)
If your definition of "programmed correctly" is that migration to a new host is as simple as you think it is, let me give you a hint ... by that definition, almost nothing of any value is programmed correctly. And modern systems, with clustered setups with failover across multiple nodes, multiple databases, connections to billing systems and the like are several orders of magnitude more complicated than you seem to think they should be.
In any event, this is moot. It's Gamespy that's shutting down, not some server that EA runs that's currently sitting under somebody's desk. In order to fix this, EA would need to dig the source for their old games out of storage, make sure they can still build it (for a game that hasn't been touched in a decade by them, this is real concern), pay a programmer to replace the bits that Gamespy uses to use something else, build it, run it through some minimal testing and release it. All this for a game that may not have made EA any money in years, and it needs to be repeated for a large number of older games.
It's a business decision. To update every game ever made by them would cost a bunch, so EA is wisely deciding to only support the more recent games or the games with sufficient demand. We could argue that they're not using the ideal criteria in deciding what should be updated, but ultimately they do have to draw the line somewhere.
My guess is that Gamespy has had very little development done in a long time and mostly just sits in a room of servers somewhere mostly running on autopilot -- costing money in hosting and power costs. I'm not sure how it is about making money -- do game publishers pay to use it? Advertising? In any event, if it's costing money but not making money, they probably told the developers if they didn't pay up they'd shut it down, and the developers didn't pay up sufficiently, so ... shut it down.
They should be forced by law to release that source code. The only reason the public granted them copyright in the first place was so that the work could eventually become Public Domain. If they're going to lock it away instead, then they've violated the social contract and no longer deserve the privilege of holding a monopoly on it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Seriously? There's still an active Doom community. People play games because they're fun, and they don't become less fun just because they're old.
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