Dedicated servers sure are nice, aren’t they? Convenient, they never go down.. Well, okay. Not really.
Glu, the company that purchased Gamespy back in August, has been cutting servers for some older and less populated games. Everyone thought Gamespy’s servers would last forever. Turns out they won’t.
Server shut downs began last month and they have been dropping like flies since. Some of the games affected by Glu’s removal of old Gamespy servers are:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X
- SWAT 4
- Sniper Elite
- Hidden and Dangerous 2
- Star Wars: Battlefront
- Neverwinter Nights
- Neverwinter Nights 2
- Halo
- Wings of War
- Battlestations: Midway
- Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring
- Conflict: Global Storm
The list is sure to grow, as Gamespy (under Glu’s ownership), is demanding large sums of money from publishers and developers to keep these servers up. Considering the age and size of some of these games, it’s not a surprise they either can’t or won’t pay the fee. Most simply can’t afford it.
Many games are launched with Gamespy’s middleware server platform, meaning the games that have had their servers shut down do not have the option to switch to another server platform. It would require a lot of work and money on their end to do so.
It’s not hard to consider Gamespy’s actions as an attempt to muscle money out of these older and smaller devs/publishers. Either they pay a large fee or the servers for their game get taken down.
Glu took the Gamespy name somewhere that no one wanted to see it go, and it’s sad to see some of these games’ only servers taken down in this blatant cash grab. This type of situation a prime example of why providing the option for users to host their own servers is essential to PC gaming in the long run.
Source: VG247
Source 2: PCGamesN
