GameSpy's New Owners Begin Disabling Multiplayer Without Warning

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.""

Do like the Tribes 2 community

[Anonymous Coward]

write your own master servers, and modify the client to work with your own authentication mechanism

http://tribesnext.com

Sound in Doom source ports

[tepples]

The source port of Doom was missing sound because the original Linux version used a non-free component licensed from a third party. Fans rewrote that.

Re:Sounds to me like...

[msauve]

A wiser company might have included well defined renewal terms, perhaps an inflation adjusted flat rate plus adders for number of users and bandwidth utilization.

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".

Re:Twitterization?

[ArhcAngel]

The link I referenced has the full list. The point is Valve could sell out at any time and the new owner might not be as nice. At least they are a private company so there isn't any danger of a hostile takeover.

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.

Re:Twitterization?

[crontabminusell]

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:$2.7 million in stock?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

GameSpy has been assholes going back to when they were a freeware providing game matching for Quake over 300 years ago.