The All-Seeing Eye

» see udpsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The All-Seeing Eye was shareware, which means a small company in Finland expected to be paid. Paying a foreign developer from Turkey in 2001 was its own small project, involving a credit card most people my age did not have, and that alone put a lot of this category out of reach here. I knew what a server browser was. I did not own this one.

It was a list. That was the entire product. You opened it and got every public server for whatever games you had ticked, with the map each one was running, how many people were on it, and how badly the connection was going to hurt. You sorted by ping, you double clicked, the game launched into that server. UDP Soft spent two years on it before releasing it on 15 June 2001, and the thing that made it better than the alternatives was speed. It refreshed thousands of servers without locking up.

GameSpy had the money and the brand and the deals with publishers. ASE had a smaller team and a program that people preferred, and for a few years that was enough to keep it growing against a much larger competitor. By September 2004 it had been downloaded more than twelve million times and over a million people were using it every month.

The part i can speak to is the shape of the room rather than the software. Between 2002 and 2005 my Counter-Strike happened in internet cafes in Ankara, on machines somebody else administered, against people sitting within a few meters of me. A worldwide list of public servers sorted by latency is a tool for a person playing alone at home on a connection good enough to make the sorting meaningful. That was a different life than the one i had.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what yahoo bought ~

Yahoo picked it up in September 2004 for a sum nobody has ever published. The reasoning was not that Yahoo had a plan for game server browsers. CNet and others were shopping in the same aisle and Yahoo wanted a foothold with players who took games seriously, so buying ASE kept it away from everyone else and put a hardcore audience on the balance sheet.

What followed says more about the acquisition than any press release. Months later Yahoo sued Xfire over a patent covering game notifications inside a messenger, a patent Yahoo held because the two engineers behind Xfire had written it while working on Yahoo Games. That fight settled quietly in January 2006 on undisclosed terms. Yahoo was more active in court over this corner of the market than it ever was in shipping anything into it.

~ what it became ~

In March and April 2008 the emails went out. ASE would be discontinued on 15 May, and anyone with a live subscription would get $15 back. Version 2.6 carries that same date, which makes the final release and the funeral the same event. When the tracking servers went off, every game that had been relying on ASE for its server list simply stopped showing one, and people who had not read the email found out by opening the program.

Yahoo pointed the leftover traffic at GameSpy Arcade, which lasted six more years and then went off in 2014, taking hundreds of games' multiplayer with it. The server browser as a separate thing you install is now gone entirely. Matchmaking moved inside the games and then inside the platforms, and you no longer pick a room. You press a button and get put somewhere. The list is still there underneath, you are just not allowed to look at it.

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