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GameSpy Attempting to Dump Mac Gamers 137

Posted by Zonk from the keep-heart-gentle-apple-users dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Inside Mac Games reports that GameSpy is trying to license its way out of supporting the Mac." From the article: "The impact of GameSpy's pricing tactics could be devastating to the Mac gaming market. A number of recent games on the Mac such as Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, Neverwinter Nights, and others use GameSpy."
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GameSpy Attempting to Dump Mac Gamers More

GameSpy Attempting to Dump Mac Gamers

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  • First post. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by numbski ( 515011 ) *
    Lame move. Basically, they don't want to continue to update their SDK for the Mac platform. Either it's costing them more, so they've increased licensing fees, OR, they don't want to bother with it any more.

    Anyone know the before and after cost of the SDK license?

    • Re:First post. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mahdi13 ( 660205 ) <icarus.lnx@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:39AM (#11032968) Journal
      This is one of the things holding the America's Army Mac port back, the GameSpy license needed renewing but they are now asking WAY too much for it. And since the in-game browser is run off GameSpy it makes the game useless.

      GameSpy was a great thing...8 years ago. Started by a Navy man that wanted a quick and easy way to find and connect to Quake servers, but it turned into a mega-corp somewhere and adopted many MS techniques of crush and conquer. FilePlanet use to be great for game downloads, but now I can't get anything even with a logon (I'm not paying them for that crap when there are many other download sites available).

      This affects more then just Macs, it affects everything they touch. Soon you'll need to logon to read the news at planetquake.com or even need to PAY them to read the news.

      People need to stop relying on GameSpy and show them we are not going to put up with their crap...unfortunately most people WILL put of with their crap because they are too lazy or narrow minded to find something else.
      • So let me get this straight.... All this software does is provide a central mechanism for finding other running game servers?

        If GameSpy wants to try to hurt the Mac game community, the game community should hurt them more. Make their business model no longer viable by coming up with a free (as in beer) replacement. One possible place to start would be grafting the functionality into AIM, Freenet, or some other P2P system.

        Better yet, use DNS. For your local LAN, use mDNS. For the internet as a whole

    • Or maybe few Mac users (or PC users for that matter) use Gamespy? I don't, because it's big, slow, they want to charge for everything, the service sucks, and in general, it's worthless. Now Steam and Battle.net on the other hand...there are some good products.

  • GameSpy sucks anyway (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrseigen ( 518390 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:05AM (#11032548) Homepage Journal
    Only Mortal is a fine enough server browser for most Mac games, and GameRanger is still available if I remember right.
    • GameRanger is neato, but it needs an SDK for in-game browsing.

      Although I don't really game too much nowadays, but I CS-Source it up whenever I go to my friend's house. I'm seriously considering building a PC JUST to play HL2 and CS-source.

      btw, I'm the man, my GameRanger ID is only 2 digits.

  • Gamespy, where have you gone? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by O_Sleep ( 199947 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:05AM (#11032549)
    I remember really liking this company in the Quake1 days. The *world.com sites where great community sites. They were the source for mods, skins, console commands, quakemovies, etc.

    Then they switched and became a really unappealing, money grubbing company. I even bought one of their for-life gamespy 3d licenses which they want me to upgrade. They switched to a for pay product and I don't think they put any money into the old one.

    Use to be a great source as well for downloads, now it's waiting in line for a public ftp server. Why haven't they embraced torrents?

    What happened at this company?

  • sad day for gaming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by biggyfries ( 622846 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:07AM (#11032567)
    This is a sad day for gaming in general. To drop support of a viable platform for monetary reasons is ir purely a financial move on GameSpy's part. They basically dont want to spend the time and/or money supporting a platform--granted, that platform is small, but that is still your customerbase youre fucking with.

    Yes, i know platforms range--ps2, xbox, gamecube, DS, cellular, etc. PC and Mac run on the same TCP protocol, just different internal programming (just like all platforms, after i think about it).,br>

    If they are dropping supprot for a (fledging?) platform, then they might as well do it for Gamecube (Network adapter? whats that?), or even PS2, since it seems that it does not have the same online userbase as the xbox.

    why isnt there a competitor to GameSpy? At least, one that is just as popular?

    • Uhm, by the very definition, if the money isnt there then its not a viable platform. Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company. The reason the competition is so small is that the market jsut isnt there.

      • Re:sad day for gaming (Score:5, Insightful)

        by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @01:34PM (#11034301) Journal
        Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company.

        Bullshit. Gamespy use to have free versions, and gave the SDK's away so they could lock companies in. Now that they are Bigger, they cant afford to offer the SDKs You always develop the SDK and give it away for free, you make your money on the license later.

        And building on OSX is much easier now, if you have a standard platform, you can cross develop a customer client that works on both. One of the nice things about OSX is games run in OpenGL on top of a unix based OS. (Can you say Linux port anyone?)

        BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye [udpsoft.com] be the replacement?

        • BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye be the replacement?

          I don't see how, since they don't offer anything for Mac or Linux.
        • The eye!

          It sees everything!
        • Mac users need to stop complaining about unequal treatment. PC users are pumping money into the PC gaming market left and right. Things are still broken all the time. Network problems, graphics card problems, install problems. You name it.

          Please don't think PC users get the royal treatment. If it wasn't for the new Doom 3 and HL2, the PC gaming would have been virtually dead compared to the console market. Ah.... That's what Apple needs, their own console!

        • xfire has become (on the pc platform) the ideal solution... hopefully they will port it to the mac

    • Re:sad day for gaming (Score:5, Funny)

      by IpalindromeI ( 515070 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @12:23PM (#11033462) Journal
      This is a sad day for gaming in general. To drop support of a viable platform for monetary reasons is ir purely a financial move on GameSpy's part.

      I, too, long for the old days when companies didn't have to think about their costs or profits. When they did whatever would make slashdot users happy. Whatever happened to those days?
      • As I recall, the dot-com bubble burst, and we all went onto fuckedcompany.com to make fun of these companies for doing things that didn't have solid monetary reasons behind them.
    • not a charity. They live or die on their financial decisions.

      -Jeff

  • So? (Score:1)

    by Mitsoid ( 837831 )
    Why use Gamespy? Cant they use alternate game hosting services to host the games? heck, some witty people made XConnect, allowing you to play XBox System Link games online.. Don't see why the mac community can't make their own hosting services, or use one of the computers in the game to 'host' the game/server while they play?

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:23AM (#11032776)
      Thats not the point of the article. Some games depend on gamespy internally, and if they don't work out of the box now, then that makes the Mac platform even less appealing.

      • Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Golias ( 176380 )
        That assumes that the Mac platform was ever appealing to gamers.

        Don't get me wrong, I use my Macs every day. One runs my music studio, another is about to become my new web server, and my iBook goes with me everywhere gets used for just about every other computing task that I do.

        But when I want to play games, I do so on either a Windows PC or a console. I'm all about using the right tool for the job.

        Yes, I could play World of Warcraft on the eMac I use for recording music, but why bother when an el-che

  • Nice example (Score:5, Insightful)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:13AM (#11032641) Homepage
    This is a nice example why vendor lock-in and closed source _can_ be bad for business.

  • Lucky day for Mac gamers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:16AM (#11032672)
    Lucky bastards. I wish they would drop the PC support too.

  • Shortsighted move... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by VernonNemitz ( 581327 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:26AM (#11032807) Journal
    What with Mac these days being a Unix workalike, and with Linux being a Unix workalike, then isn't support for Mac almost the same as support for Linux? AND with Linux beginning to take desktop space away from Windows, a move away from Mac/Linux becomes the same as restricting oneself to a shrinking market share! (Of course, if some fundamental misunderstanding was written into the preceding, I'm sure someone will let me know, heh.)

  • Oh Well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TychoCelchuuu ( 835690 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:29AM (#11032843) Journal
    It's their loss. Mac gamers are just going to have to do what everyone who gets fed up with Gamespy does and switch to another server browser. Maybe they'll like it more or maybe they wont, but Gamespy had better hope that the Mac doesn't gain any ground as a gaming platform because then they would have to try and regain ground with a whole community of pissed of gamers who are wondering why they were dumped in the first place.
    • Actually, this insiduous move wrecks more havoc than you think. Remember that built in server finding client that Game Spy was selling people? The one nobody thought was a good idea? Well America's Army bit, and now that the Mac port is coming close to a finish, Gamespy is moving to ludicrously price the Mac version of their client browser. Coincidence? Probably.

    • Re:Oh Well (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Malacon ( 761384 )
      It's their loss. Mac gamers are just going to have to do what everyone who gets fed up with Gamespy does and switch to another server browser.

      Then you don't really understand the point here. The issue here is that a lot of games are made on the PC use gamespy. They are then ported over to the Macintosh and the gamespy browser is also ported. This allows Mac and PC users to game against/with eachother. This is done in the game, its the developers choice to use this browser, not the gamers. It isn't as s
  • A mac version of the all seeing eye? [udpsoft.com] that would be a worthwhile interace. unfortunatley my company blocks it so i can't check.

  • America's Army (Score:4, Informative)

    by wolf31o2 ( 778801 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @11:36AM (#11032933)
    Don't forget that America's Army also uses GameSpy. I would hate to not be able to frag my Mac-loving friends anymore.
  • I'm not into (online) gaming much, so forgive me, if I understood something wrong.

    AFAIU GameSpy is a tool that helps you to locate other players that want to play the same game online. So, if they drop the support for my OS or fuck up things in other ways, I'll quit using it and search for companions/opponents somewhere else and with another tool or no tool at all.

    So, what's the big fuzz around this?

    Kosi
    • A lot of the PC games are using Gamespy on an *internal* basis now, using Gamespy-specific server design. There just won't be any way to communicate between the Mac and PC versions of the package because Mac development is almost 100% of the time licensed out to a handful of Mac developers.

      The PC devs will pay the cash and make Gamespy internal and integral to their product, and the Mac devs won't be able to license Gamespy to make their ports talk. That's the big picture they're painting.
    • Some videogames, having seen the good record of Gamespy service in years past built Gamespy browsers and such into their video game at release. Gamespy's protocols and formats are *not* a standard, and i'm sure there's proprietary crap all over it. Now that they want to drop support, many video games that people like to play online on the Mac may just.stop.working, or at best you'll have to manually enter server numbers.
      • I still don't understand. If GS doesn't work for me, I'll find my opponents/companions otherwise. Even if it's built in, I can't imagine that you 'd be forced to find other players only though it, only idiots would buy such a game! You can get together on Websites, IRC, IM or many many other ways, swap your IP addresses and go playing, where's the problem?

  • I guess I should be affected by this somehow.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Selecter ( 677480 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @12:34PM (#11033596)
    But I'm not.

    I own both a Dual 1.8 G5 and find the Mac to be a superior platform over Windows for everything I do in computing.....EXCEPT gaming. For that, I have my 3000+ homemade box.

    As I get older, I dont game as much or as often. I expect there's a lot more like me in the same boat, they used to be hardcore gamers back in their 20's but I'm a lot more interested in producing and making videos and music these days.

    Mac beats the PC hands down for that. ( for me )

  • I may be naive, but I've been thinking that the bigger game developers ought to cooperate and form some kind of platform-agnostic server browsing service which would untie them from the pc/mac lock-up that is now. I really hate it when I can't play with my PC friends just because I've got a mac, and this GameSpy mess really needs a solution, obviously.

  • Who cares? It's a free market. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @01:25PM (#11034183)
    If GameSpy puts themselves out of reach for companies, companies will simply adopt another solution. GameSpy's loss, because this might cause companies to switch to another solution on both Mac and PC platforms to have a unified interface between their two software versions. Yes, it would require coding work to swap out Gamespy for another solution, but I'm sure some enterprising company will come up with a solution that is very similar to Gamespy in it's programming interfaces.
  • The gamespy interface in games is weak and lame and devoid of basic features. And half the time, the filter features don't even work in the released game! I've bought a couple games in the last year where filters had no effect at all and another game where I have yet to see a single game server pop up in 9 months, with all filters off (no connection to master server).

    If they want to be the defacto game search interface for the industry, they need to get off their lazy butts and do it right. And while Ma

    • OpenPlay (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dawang ( 611122 )

      You like open source (or semi... APSL [apple.com]) and cross-platform?

      OpenPlay [apple.com] is a start. Been around a while, but I don't know of any net games that use it. The mailing list seems to still be active [apple.com], but I'm not a member, so I can't tell you what they're really up to.

      Most of these comments are talking about how the end-users are suffering from GameSpy - it's really the developers. If I wrote an app and licensed GameSpy because they had a cross-platform SDK, I'd be pissed if they then told me that one of those plat

      • I'm not sure how active that mailing list is, since the project has moved to sourceforge [sourceforge.net],

        The stats show 47.2% activity in the last week, and it is listed as 'mature', or level 6.

        This could perhaps be exactly what is needed to relinquish control of cross-platform network gaming from the likes of GameSpy. It just needs more exposure, since hardly any game developers are likely to have heard of it.

  • Gamespy as cybersquatter: who needs 'em? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zhe Mappel ( 607548 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @06:07PM (#11037047)
    It was never a good idea to rely on a third party such as Gamespy to provide a branded in-game browser. For one, that reliance drives up development costs for licensing fees. For another, it leaves you in a pickle when Gamespy decides to take its ball and go home.

    In the PC world, hardcore gamers avoid Gamespy like the plague (and we don't bother to read its crappy ad-driven "content" online, either).

    Apple can easily remedy the problem we're discussing by making a gaming browser part of OS X. No need to let a third party squat on what should be a seamless interchange between client and server, managed by the OS.

  • What the developers say about it (Score:5, Informative)

    by rodik ( 265319 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @06:11PM (#11037081) Homepage
    Brad Oliver of Aspyr Media that (among others) does mac ports of popular titles has commented on the issue in the Inside Mac Games forums, right here: http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php? p=192796&highlight=#192796 [insidemacgames.com]

    • Re:Microsoft Involvment (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Had a look at this link, some guy seems to think that such a move would be good for microsoft as it would slow the growth of Mac gaming. I'm sure it would be impossible to prove.

      But honestly how much effort does it take to support the mac sdk? From a coding perspective, isn't it just getting a list of servers from another server? I thought all the important work would be on the server side, isn't that what people are paying for? what the server provides? a list of other servers? I mean that functionali
  • I've thought about this for a while. Why don't game companies or shareware game developers develop an open protocol? That way, you don't have the problem of some company screwing you after you've developed your game. -- TheMadRedHatter

  • Something I'll be interested to see... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 59Bassman ( 749855 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @06:26AM (#11040727) Journal
    is whether PC users who regularly play with Mac users do anything to try to support their Mac brethren.

    Years ago I played a MMO flight sim called "Warbirds" (It's still around I think, but it's a shadow of its former self). When they went from version 1 to version 2 (3D models), they didn't release the Mac version concurrently. Version 2 had its own troubles, but it was just gorgeous. The models were beautiful. However, we spent several months staying in the old V1 arenas because a significant number of our squadmates were Mac jockeys. It wasn't fair to leave them behind, so we tried to keep them involved.

    I wonder if current clans with Mac members will try to do something similar to support them.

  • I like playing Neverwinter Nights on Linux, and, given that Atari now supports Linux on two of its blockbuster games (UT2004 and NWN), I would say it will continue without problems, given that, from what I have seen, GameSpy is just a server locater in NWN, and the actual server has been ported to linux. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but would it not be easier to port from Windows->Linux x86 than from Windows->Mac, because it's on the same platform? Well, anyway, I really don't care about Macs beca

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