GameSpy's New Owners Begin Disabling Multiplayer Without Warning 247
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.""
$2.7 million in stock? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:$2.7 million in stock? (Score:5, Insightful)
If walmart suddenly closed its 20 smallest stores would it suddenly not be a major company?
The problem with gamespy is that most PC games have shifted to steam or their own publishers dedicated multiplayer (e.g. through origin or Uplay). At this point gamespy multiplayer is mostly legacy stuff, and there aren't a lot of options for them in the marketplace.
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gamespy is still used by a lot of older games, with no alternative.
I discovered this the hard way when I just got battlefield 2 for the 10th anniversary of 1942.
It was always a kludgy system. They've shut down more service offerings over the past 10 years than I think have opened.
Cant you write a protocol wrapper? (Score:3)
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?
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A wrapper wouldn't make a ton of sense. But just writing your own implementation of the Gamespy master server would be relatively easy. For most games it's implemented as a simple heartbeat system, with servers periodically reporting to the master, and clients then querying the master for a list of servers.
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GameSpy has been assholes going back to when they were a freeware providing game matching for Quake over 300 years ago.
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Maybe 10 years ago, but lately? I'm surprised they're still in business. I would have thought they went the way of TEN by now.
Re:$2.7 million in stock? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead Steam did it "no you can't order pizza directly but you can open a browser and grubhub."
What Steam and Valve also did well was they gave you a reason to want to be a part of their community. Games like left 4 dead encouraged you to make friends otherwise you'd get stuck with a horrible team. When I was on Gamespy, there was never any incentive to participate in the community.
Twitterization? (Score:2)
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!
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the developers should not have used a single source proprietary solution that basically placed their wellbeing in the hands of a third party. This is what is known is willing dropping your drawers and hoping there won't be an assraping.
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The same goes for users willingly buying games with online DRM such as Steam or Origin (the EA DRM system). That's also asking to be fucked over.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll give you being wary of EA/Origin, but Valve/Steam haven't shown any signs of being douches so far, so I give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm pretty sure all Source based games have the option to connect directly to a server if you have the IP at least, and with other games these days you basically know that you're not getting eternal support. I find it crazy that so many people are willing to buy a new Call Of Duty every year or two when it's basically the same game just with new maps, but that's the way of it these days.. when I started online gaming, I got years of fun out of free Half-Life mods and free maps. I still have a lot of respect for Valve and the way they foster community.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve/Steam haven't shown any signs of being douches so far,
Neither did GameSpy (originally known as QuakeSpy [wikipedia.org]) prior to its acquisition by GLU Mobile. My question is didn't they have a contract in place to prevent this? If not, why not? If I am developing my product around a third parties ecosystem I am making damn sure they can't just pull the rug out on a whim. I'm sure there are details missing to this story. I can't believe GLU would be able to down these services without notifying the affected partners.
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gamespy has been owned by a few different companies. IGN being the former.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:4, Informative)
GLU Mobile is having a bad [venturebeat.com] 4thQ [nasdaq.com] and this stinks to me of a plot to extort money off of their affiliates.
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If I am developing my product around a third parties ecosystem I am making damn sure they can't just pull the rug out on a whim.
Then you better make cross platform OS agnostic applications. Do you get a contract from MS for Windows programs to ensure they won't put your code on the Malicious Software Removal Tool's kill list? It's not the same with middle ware, eh? But what is an OS but middle-ware for hardware abstraction? They probably didn't get such a contract with GameSpy for the same reason they don't have one with MS.
Valve's bringing Steam to Linux, so I think you're spot on with the 3rd party rug and carpet analogy...
Re:Twitterization? (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe he's saying that Valve are seeing an increased likelihood that Microsoft might flip a switch in Windows, which will make Steam, or Steam-powered games, stop working. Linux, for Valve, is (partly) a hedge against that. There is no one company (other than Valve itself) that can come along and "turn off" Steam for Linux.
If Steam continues to function on Windows, then that's great for Valve. If it doesn't, however, then Valve are wise to have a fall-back plan. It's a lot better to have 90% of your income wiped out (all those Steam games that don't run on Linux), than to have 100% of it wiped out, and be scrambling for a fix while the coffers run dry.
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FPS games weren't bad on dialup. You just found a local server. Back when I lived in the South, I frequented a Day of Defeat server in Virginia -- on cheap dialup, I was getting ~100-150 ping, which is more or less what I get on cable for east/west coast connections.
So, FPS-wise at least, the world hasn't gotten any better -- it's just gotten wider. I guess. Weird.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's one big difference between GameSpy and Valve, though: Valve is a privately owned corporation. They're not at the whims of often disconnected or plain and simply stupid shareholders, they're not forced to disclose numbers for anything (and indeed, rarely do), they're not chasing next quarter's profit margin, and perhaps most importantly the owners care about the company, their products, and their fans. I don't see a Carly Fiorina getting on Valve's team anytime soon, if ever.
Going public may give you a big money boost, but it's like selling your soul to the devil.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Going public may give you a big money boost, but it's like selling your soul to the devil.
Technically, it's selling your soul to Wall St.
No, I take that back. You're absolutely correct.
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The lack of Support regarding Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a good example. Community owners requested that Valve fixes the broken menus issue, instead, they broke them even f
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Sure, but at least they're really nice about it.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Informative)
Steam not being douches? And what about when they say "accept our new licence agreement, the one where you we decide that you can't sue us no matter what, our we take back all the games you bought from us and all your games you bought elsewhere and which use our DRM" ?
Not allowing me to buy any new game from them if I don't accept their new licence is faire. Stealing the game I already bought because I don't like the idea of being assrape by a company is not. Steam are not only douches, they are crooks.
While I agree in principle that "holding one's games hostage" was a bad thing, you should listen to Gabe Newell's reasoning behind the TOS change here [joystiq.com] (fast forward to about 8:15). If you read the TOS, it doesn't talk about not being able to sue them, it's about not being able to start a class action suit against them. As Gabe Newell (briefly) explains in the video, the class action suits they face start out very one-sided in favor of the suing attorney. It costs them a ton of money just to go through the motions for the court, no matter if they're completely in the right or not. That's not exactly fair, regardless of how much money anyone thinks Valve has. As it was put in the video, "it's a shakedown."
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree in principle that "holding one's games hostage" was a bad thing, you should listen to Gabe Newell's reasoning behind the TOS change here [joystiq.com] (fast forward to about 8:15). If you read the TOS, it doesn't talk about not being able to sue them, it's about not being able to start a class action suit against them. As Gabe Newell (briefly) explains in the video, the class action suits they face start out very one-sided in favor of the suing attorney. It costs them a ton of money just to go through the motions for the court, no matter if they're completely in the right or not. That's not exactly fair, regardless of how much money anyone thinks Valve has. As it was put in the video, "it's a shakedown."
Having worked as a class action attorney, I do agree with you to a certain extent. Many class actions are simply shakedowns by plaintiff attorneys. But they can also be one of the only ways to hold a company liable for their wrongdoing. Are you, or anyone for that matter, going to sue Valve/Steam for $50? I know I wouldn't go through the hassle of a lawsuit for so little money, even if I had a bulletproof case. And this works to the company's advantage because if they can take $50 from a million people through wrongful means, but none of those people will sue individually, then the company essentially just stole $50 million with no risk.
Granted, the attorneys on both sides see most of the money. But if you look at class actions as taking unjust gains away from companies, rather than reimbursing consumers, class action are, other than government action, the only way to really hold these companies accountable for their actions.
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Granted, the attorneys on both sides see most of the money. But if you look at class actions as taking unjust gains away from companies, rather than reimbursing consumers, class action are, other than government action, the only way to really hold these companies accountable for their actions.
I've always thought that the cries about lawsuit reform were as much about companies wanting to be able to get away with defrauding customers/stockholders as about avoiding shakedowns. Lerach was probably hated just as much for exposing stock option backdating as he was for being a shakedown artist.
That said, I think there is a good way to reform class action lawsuits: strict parity in payouts for the class and their attorneys, both in kind and in time. By that I mean that if the settlement is $10 millio
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You mean unlike what corporations do to everyone else all the time? How completely unfair and wrong for average people, who have to get attorneys and get a class certification to begin with (which costs a ton of money just to go through the motions for the court, no matter if theyre completely in the right or not), to actually have some kind of remedy that corporations are ACTUALLY AFRAID OF. No, that's just not right. Instead the filthy peasants should be stuck with non-remedies that corporations have no r
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There are a lot of games that require Steam, even if you purchased them on disc at retail. You have to install Steam and have a Steam account to register and play them.
They use Steam as DRM. Having the physical disc doesn't actually matter. The only important thing in the game's box is the Steam license key.
These games tend to need Steam even if you bought them from Impulse or GamersGate or Amazon Downloads.
This is what they meant by 'games you bought elsewhere and which use our DRM'.
Re:Twitterization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Because the Quake engine had it, Half-Life (based on Quake Engine) had it, and the Source engine has it. I used to use it to connect to LAN and internet games alike. All of Valve's games have been based on continual evolution of this engine. Valve always let you access the console in PC versions of your games. Maybe the console versions too, I'm not sure there. They also actively encourage modding of their games.
Just because you're a fuckwit who has poured money into Steam and therefore, since you see yourself as NOT a fuckwit, it can't have been a fuckwit decision?
Money doesn't mean that much to me at this point in my life, and so doesn't really come into what I think of Steam.
I see Steam as more of a delivery mechanism. Pretty much all games on Steam have been designed to be able to run separately. If you really want to, you can strip out the DRM and run them standalone.
Take it from me: you're a fuckwit.
I'm not sure you're qualified to make that assumption in this context. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to the PC gaming scene over the last 20 years can see that Valve have been one of the best companies out there in terms of making good games, and encouraging the community to modify them to make them even better.
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I didn't say that, you're putting words in my mouth. I did imply that there are already tools to crack the DRM. You can backup/crack all your game content as you buy it if you are really so concerned about them reneging on their promises.
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A lot of developers have no choice but to choose middleware for their games. The alternative would cost way more, which for a budget tends to be a larger piece of the pie than middleware.
At least with steam, Valve have promised to unlock all the doors should they ever go out of business.
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Valve has officially stated that in the event that they would have to shut down the service they would provide an update to allow full offline access to all the user's content. So if you've downloaded your games and backed them up you'd be fine.
In that way they provide a balanced service. Users can download their content anywhere they game, and their saves and other data travel with them. It works out. Their DRM is the least intrusive I've encountered. No nasty rootkits or broken drivers polluting my system
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I would imagine that going with a single source solution is what allowed them to afford it. "If you just use us, we'll keep your servers up until we don't, and we won't charge you an arm and a leg."
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Yes, it's called "economics".
Do like the Tribes 2 community (Score:5, Informative)
write your own master servers, and modify the client to work with your own authentication mechanism
http://tribesnext.com
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Which you can't do without ripping out the library that talks to the original host, as you won't have a licence for it.
So, you now need to reimplement both client libraries, and servers, at a time when you can't test your mods against the original, because they've shut down the servers.
This is not going to be cheap.
Re:Do like the Tribes 2 community (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the problem. gamespy is mainly legacy stuff, Sniper elite is from about 2005, neverwinter nights is a lot older than that. There's just no money in writing all new multiplayer + patching for a 7 or 8 year old game unless it's an MMO type product. It's not that you can't do it, it's that 7 or 8 years on with no warning there isn't a whole lot of value in allocating 3 programmers for 3 or 4 months onto the problem.
Everything new is going to be done with your own publisher servers, the console platform publishers or with Steam, I think the last big game to use gamespy for multiplayer was borderlands, or at least that's the last big one I can think of. Borderlands 2 looks like it integrates steamworks for PC multiplayer.
Kickstarter or Open Source (Score:2)
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If there are 2000-3000 people still semi regularly playing your game, and it's going to take 100k to get it going how likely do you think a kickstarter is? What if you can't get it done? (Some of this stuff is absolutely ancient code, the people involved may have long since moved on or stopped coding for years, it may be writing multiplayer from the ground up. Not impossible, but probably not worth the expense of many tens or small hundreds of thousands of dollars for a small number of players). And we
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Aren't both StarCraft (1, including Brood War) and WarCraft 2 (Battle.Net edition, which include the expansion) still supported on Battle.Net? Those games are at least 14 years old now. WC3 is also still supported, at over 10 years. I suspect Diablo 2 is as well, although I haven't checked. I do not like the direction that Blizzard has gone, and refuse to buy their new games until they make signing into Battle.Net completely optional, but they do a fantastic job of supporting their old ones.
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Flight Simulator X came out over six years ago. October 13, 2006.
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Sorry but you are thinking of Microsofts current sorry excuse for a flight simulator called simply "Microsoft Flight".
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Other people can pick apart the Flight simulator X topic specifically, but I said mainly for a reason. I'm sure you still *can* use gamespy and if you hate using Steamworks (and believe me, I would have the utmost sympathy if you do) and don't have a big publisher you do just write your own. My point was that it's a rapidly shrinking market for gamespy, which is probably why IGN sold it.
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Why not let the fans fix it? Is the source really worth that much?
Probably not, but releasing code is not free. Do they own all the code, if not where did they license it from, what does the license say, who needs to sign off on this, are we taking a risk that someone will sue over some patent or rogue developer who copied code without permission, can someone find exploits or multi player cheats in the code and whatever. Particularly the artwork is almost certainly not free, so it'd be an engine release where you need the original licensed game to be legal. So after all t
Sound in Doom source ports (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do like the Tribes 2 community (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the source really worth that much?
Short answer yes.
Long answer: Letting the fans 'fix' it may not be a solution. It's not just a game bug, it's a whole system missing, who is going to run and pay for the servers? Do you want the experience of playing your game to involve downloading some sketchy patch from some sketchy place and connecting to some sketchy server? Letting fans work on it means it could take years to resolve if at all. You may be reusing major portions of your code, you may not own the license to it etc. Take neverwinter nights, which is aurora toolkit. I spoke specifically with two bioware guys a couple of weeks ago about how it would be nice if that toolkit was still available for teaching game design with (because it will run on anything and you can use existing game assets and a few other things), and I basically got a non answer (if you can find it on a shelf go to it, which is fair enough, but I was hoping for something more useful). My suspicion is that the source for the games would have an interplay license on it, and interplay has less employees than there are people commenting on this thread, so trying to come up with a plan to give away the source for free could take ages, assuming you ever could. And notice the baulders gate enhanced edition that just came out? If you gave away the source for free it would make a re-release or a port to new platforms much harder to commercialize if you want to do that sort of thing. (Neverwinter nights for iPad for example).
For something like star wars battlefront, the company that made it doesn't even exist. The source is probably in a lucasarts archive somewhere, but they may not even have the people to review the code to be sure they aren't giving away something that was licensed but maybe didn't make the credits (say from a shop on the corner or that they bought a generic package). The art assets.... again, hard to say.
It's not that you can't, and for some games that's probably a good idea, god knows in the teaching game development and design side of things we would love more games with source, but it's something you really need to plan for in advance.
Sounds to me like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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7 years is already a pretty long term contract for a mediocre FPS shooter. They aren't going to make any more money on Sniper game sales, as Sniper 2 was released this year.
Re:Sounds to me like... (Score:5, Informative)
They say the cost is "far in excess" of what they were previously paying, but "tens of thousands of pounds a year" is far less than a single employee costs, so it's not unreasonable to think that perhaps it wasn't a profitable proposition for GLU/Gamespy. Perhaps there were terms of the type described, the success of the game caused the user/bandwidth adders to increase, and this is just a case of trying to redirect customer anger because Rebellion doesn't want to foot the bill for an older game, despite its success.
You call it "mediocre," but it won game of the year, has good ratings, was successful enough to spawn a sequel, and has enough of a continuing user base to get angered by this event, requiring in a public response by the publisher. None of which support the adjective "mediocre".
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Game of the year means exactly dick. There are more game of the year video games than years of video games. Plenty of sequels are made specifically because the first version sucked.
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Well, those aren't really "mediocre FPS shooters" :)
And the original Doom wasn't even client/server, it was LAN peer-to-peer with IPX and modem support only (and was really painful over the Internet with any sort of latency compared to modern games...) Though there have of course been many adds ons and ports that changed that, most not by id...
And id released the Quake 3 source code over 7 years ago, so people can do whatever with it, including fixing security holes, creating new trackers, etc. There's no
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in the future... (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose in the future, developers will think twice before using gamespy.
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Hey, I bet if they'd have just come out and said, "We're going to shutdown that service in 2 weeks, you might want to post your sever ips for your users." they'd still get yelled at by users, but at least it wouldn't harm them professionally.
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Hopefully in the future developers will think twice before depending on someone else period.
This will happen within 5-10 years when the "cloud" market disappears. Companies will lose millions because Dropbox or Salesforce suddenly decides to shut down.
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Cloning dropbox shouldnt be that hard, its just a large public file server with de-duplication.
You could probably make a api clone that works on a linux/samba server.
Syncing content, well, thats just what rsync does. Not that hard.
Re:in the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
It already happens ALL the time. We have a vendor for a CRM that just shut down the ODBC connection that they were implicitly charging us for. We went in to renew the contract and they said "Oh yea, ODBC is deprecated. You wont be able to connect to it after January 1st" to which we said "So how are we supposed to do reporting on the data?" and they replied "We have a new reporting service. You tell us which reports you need written and we'll charge you by the hour." As far as my employer is concerned "The cloud" is dead. The majority of cloud services we've dealt with have turned into extortion rackets in recent years. Upper management didn't see it coming but they're definitely on to it now. You can only sign a contract for so long... and once it's up they have you by the short hairs.
Ended FSX Matchmaking (Score:2)
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It never made sense that Microsoft didn't use Live for FSX.
I think we've all learned something here today (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:I think we've all learned something here today (Score:5, Funny)
Three things, if you include an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
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Three things, if you include an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
Which is exactly the problem. A Christian's fanatical devotion should be to God.
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Trouble is, there is no god, only human flawed ideas about a hypothetical construct referred as a god.
I had this same problem with the entities in my machine intelligence simulation. To ease them into an otherwise mind shattering event I try to gently push them in the right direction so they'll discover they're in a simulation. I let them gaze as far as they wish into the distances and discover no other life but their own. I let them discover that their world works on packets of information -- Quanta -- and thus they derived an almost correct theory of how the sim runs, "Quantum Physics" they call it. De
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We need to poke GameSpy with the soft cushions!
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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 arou
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The answer is "no" (Score:3)
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 co
screwed by a provider... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who could have called that happening?
Well, besides cortchety old Richard Stallman. Nobody listens to him.
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Of course, his opinion is that any corporation is out to screw you so it's like using a broken clock to predict the time. Unless of course you think all corporations are evil and you should go live in some hippie commune that make everything they need themselves.
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Vendor Lock In - Open Source (Score:2)
Kickstarter (Score:2)
Tens of thousands of pounds is well inside the range that you can get from kickstarter. Some game developers got a million or two. So give it a try.
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T-shirts. Kickstarter people always want t-shirts.
Hey, why not? (Score:2)
Tunngle ftw (Score:2)
Lost a game we have been playing weekly for years myself altho it has been a couple months now for Flatout2 :(
But, not going with gamespy may have turned out even worse as the publisher went away years ago. No idea who has been paying up to this point if anyone.
Gamepsy has the infrastructure for this already and many of these games aren't even a blip on their radar. Seems like the good will just keeping them up might be worth it. How much can it really cost them to do matchmaking for a game with a couple hu
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PS...who does the message of the day thing and what are they smoking...."My Aunt MAUREEN was a military advisor to IKE & TINA TURNER!!" wtf?
It's a Zippy quote.
http://www.zippythepinhead.com/ [zippythepinhead.com]
Yes, Bill Griffith has smoked a lot of weird things in his life, physical and metaphysical.
Slashdot uses the fortune-mod to take the output of fortune and put it on the web.
bmo@owlcomm ~> fortune zippy
I wish I was on a Cincinnati street corner holding a clean dog!
bmo@owlcomm ~> fortune zippy
If our behavior is s
I love a good social media trainwreck... (Score:3)
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?
Gamespy middleware (Score:2)
Any market for a 3rd party middleware that can be used with other services?
Anyone got API docs, or want to reverse-engineer the Gamespy middleware?
Perhaps a couple gamedevs could concentrate on that instead of rewriting their game :-)
Get a SLA (Score:2)
How can you as a developer choose to rely on a third party organization for your livelihood, AND fail to choose to get a signed SLA, contract period, and guarantee of renewal for a certain period at price $X, before agreeing to start purchasing from a service provider?
You are shooting yourself in the foot. Don't bet your livelihood on a vendor, you don't have a solid agreement with.
Don't buy from a vendor, if their going away will have significant cost, unless you protect yourself against that cos
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So, don't rely on Microsoft? Man, just changed my whole world outlook.
Re:Not just gamespy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I hear you...
My programs are resolution independent. Blame the "genius" engine devs that gamer folks tend to worship, not me. I just reconstruct the view matrix if the view resizes. It's really simple stuff. This means resizing can actually work, to give the game different aspect ratio in real time, or adapt to any current or future screen size. However, if you make the window really short and wide you can actually end up with greater than 180 degree horizontal view -- OpenGL view angle is given in ve
ExxonMobil (Score:2)
It seems to me that we are being prepped for our new "Mobile" interfaces, everything has to be focus'd and geared towards phones now.
Heck, even oil giant Exxon has gone mobile [wikipedia.org].
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Unless you want to say, develop the most profitable game of all time, which is online only. Obviously is makes no sense to design a single player game first if you aren't creating a single player game.
Honestly, the big games are all about money (most are created by large public companies, so no surprise there!), and unless there is a subscription or in-game transactions, there isn't much money in keeping free servers running indefinitely.
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So let the players host servers, the way nearly all games worked when I was really into that sort of thing.
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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.
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Unless you want to say, develop the most profitable game of all time, which is online only. Obviously is makes no sense to design a single player game first if you aren't creating a single player game.
Honestly, the big games are all about money (most are created by large public companies, so no surprise there!), and unless there is a subscription or in-game transactions, there isn't much money in keeping free servers running indefinitely.
Lets see, most profitable game of all time? World of Warcraft? Was that developed as a multiplayer game first? Not really. Its based on an old RTS game. While there was a multiplayer component in the original 1996 game, it wasn't the primary target and it was completely playable and enjoyable as a single player game.
So I'm going to argue that the most profitable game of all time was designed as a single player game first, since todays World of Warcraft is really an 'expansion' from that original 1996 RTS 'W
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Are you trolling, or just really, really dumb? WC:OaH is an RTS; WoW is a (MMO)RPG. They aren't even vaguely related genres. There's absolutely zero technical elements of WC1 in WoW. There aren't even any in WC3 (probably not in WC2, though I may be wrong there). Story elements, sure, but not a single line of (16-bit DOS-based) code was carried over.
LAN or same-screen? (Score:2)
Never develop your programs based on a service that can die at any point.
Such as the Internet? Or electricity? (See Dies the Fire or NBC's Revolution or even the real world during armed conflict.)
Also, ALWAYS develop a game with local play in mind.
By this do you mean LAN multiplayer or same-screen multiplayer with two to four gamepads plugged into one PC? Now that Steam has the Big Picture launcher, more people will be setting up gaming PCs in the living room, which could be great for games in inherently same-screen multiplayer genres such as party games, fighting games, and cooperative platformers.
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If the packets are known and published, just make a clone server, or proxy redirector.
4 seconds search found me some gamespy sources.
http://code.ohloh.net/file?fid=1c1Tee9ug_QdZDW7DdTP84C9r1c&cid=x9T_b9mKIf4&s=gamespy&mp=1&ml=1&me=1&md=1&browser=Default#L177 [ohloh.net]
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Bitching to a company that clearly doesn't care won't help (because YOU AREN'T BUYING THEIR NEW GAMES!)
But if enough people are playing the old games still, they don't have to go through the expense of making new ones. They could use the PBS model: "Attention valued players of $GAME, our servers and bandwidth cost money, and Mitt Romney threatened to eat Big Bird for Thanksgiving. Please donate $2,000,000 so that we can keep the servers running for another year." When the money stream finally dries up, they can let it die with very little ill-will.
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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.
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lol > implying that any game that uses gamespy is worth playing
last time something tried to install gamespy on one of my machines was like .... 5 years ago
> implying that any game less than 5 years old is worth playing.
It's Stupid Having Years Go Down the Damn Tubes.