Gamespy Shutdown

[Garniso]

Apparently I have an account on [CV] clan's forums. Here is what I was just emailed:

We as the Halo community need to band together as a way of Saving Halo PC/CE as we know it. Post to let us know that you are with us.

Recap:

Gamespy, worth $55million in 2004 recently sold its business to GLU for the equivalent of $2.8 million in GLU stock. Glu quickly—and without notification or warning--shut down several games like Sniper Elite that were being played on Gamespy. They simply turned them off one day and gamers were not notified.


The situation as I see it:

GLU is mostly interested in Zygna-like cell phone and tablet apps. After reading their presentation from a capital-raising conference, I would say unequivocally that they bought Gamespy strictly to acquire the technology of middleware that GS has and they have little or no interest in the legacy games that are still hosted there.

Glu Mobile immediately purged the GameSpy network of games no longer properly supported by publishers. Says one writer:

And by "properly supported" I mean those publishers willing to fork out a higher fee to retain the GameSpy service

It turns out that the games still hosted by Gamespy need to be supported by their original publishers in order for GLU to not turn them off. Apparently, it costs a lot of money to yearly maintain these games on the server that matches the IP’s for gamers from the common list. According to one source this amounts to tens of thousands of dollars a year.


Sniper Elite developer Rebellion couldn't afford the new prices so wrote an open letter to its community explaining what's going on:

Starting sometime as early as October, the people who purchased GameSpy began contacting developers and publishers for games which were part of the GameSpy network, attempting to get them to 're-support' their games. I am assuming this is a euphemism for paying some amount of money. The original GameSpy left a huge number of legacy games on their network and this new outfit has now 'conducted an audit' and those games which are 'no longer supported by their publisher' (their verbiage) have been removed.


In January, Microsoft announced that they were monitoring the number of players on the Halo2PC Gamespy site and because the number of players (or maybe servers) was down to “20 a day” they would allow the site to be shut down in mid February. They later rescinded this and deferred the shutdown to April.

http://cv.invisionzone.com/index.php?sh ... entry97338

[[XK]Erøsion]

Well Halo 2 was a big flop, I'm surprised they had 20 people playing per day.


Halo pc/ce still has thousands playing a day on the other hand. I doubt they'll shut it down anytime soon. People been saying that for years.

[Garniso]

From the email, i doubt it will come down to people playing the game still. If Microsoft is having to pay to keep they game running, then it will be a business decision.

[[XK]Neeto]

the halo 2 campaign part of game was okay but I really didn't care for its multiplayer. I played 20 or 30 online multiplayer games total. Like erosion said, i think there's enough people playing halo 1 pc for us to not need to worry about it getting taken down.