GameSpy

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

~ the goodbye ~

gamespy industries was founded in 1999 by mark surfas, who had been running quakespy as a quake server browser since the mid-90s. the company spun off two related products. one was matchmaking middleware that let any game studio plug in a server list and a lobby system without writing the netcode. the other was a network of editorial websites called the planet network (planetquake and planethalflife on through hundreds of other game-specific sites). gamespy arcade, the consumer-facing matchmaker, became one of the few pieces of pc software that almost any multiplayer player had touched at least once.

in 2004 gamespy industries merged with ign entertainment, which was itself owned by news corporation by then. the editorial side became part of ign's content network. the matchmaking middleware kept running for paying game studio clients, and over the next decade more than 800 titles built their online play on top of it. nintendo wii and ds wifi multiplayer used gamespy infrastructure. ea built battlefield and crysis online play on it. older pc games like sin and the swat series stayed online for years longer than they otherwise would have because gamespy kept the lights on.

glu mobile acquired the gamespy infrastructure business in august 2012 from ign. the editorial gamespy.com site was shut down in february 2013. the matchmaking service ran for another sixteen months while glu negotiated extensions with publishers and tried to wind it down quietly. on may 31, 2014 the servers were finally switched off. ea reported 24 of its pc games lost their online functionality on that day. nintendo wii and ds players opening games like mario kart wii or super smash bros brawl found that online play was simply no longer there. some titles got fan-made replacement servers within months, like wiimmfi for nintendo. most did not.

i played counter-strike at internet cafes in ankara between 2002 and 2005. gamespy was the international layer above us, and we mostly did not use it. cs in turkey ran on a shared notepad of turkish server ips that the cafe owner kept on his desktop, the same way a friend's house party works on word-of-mouth instead of evite. gamespy was for finding strangers across countries. by the time i moved to playing online from home in 2006, valve's steam was already eating the matchmaking layer for source-engine games, and gamespy was a brand i associated with the planet network of fan sites more than with software i ran.

~ the chronicle ~

~ planet network ~

the planet network was the editorial half of gamespy that most players actually remembered. planetquake hosted mod files and walkthroughs back when fileplanet was a half-trusted mirror with download queues. planethalflife covered every counter-strike beta. planetdoom kept the doom community oriented through the wilderness years between 1999 and the doom 3 release. each site had its own news team and its own forum running its own house style. when ign absorbed gamespy in 2004 most of these sites were folded into the ign network and quietly retired through the late 2000s. by 2012 the entire planet network was either dead or a cobwebbed redirect.

~ the day it died ~

may 31, 2014 was a saturday. it had been announced two months earlier and most publishers had time to prepare. some did. ea moved a few of its games to other matchmaking platforms in advance. nintendo did not. on the morning of june 1, players in north america opening mario kart wii saw a friendly notice that online play was no longer available. brawl and a long list of other older nintendo titles went dark in the same window. for many of these games online play had been the entire reason they were still in active rotation in 2014. for the ones nintendo had quietly stopped supporting on its own end years earlier, gamespy had been the only thing keeping the lights on.

~ the long tail ~

the fan replacement scene is what kept some of those games alive past 2014. wiimmfi was a nintendo-targeted reimplementation of the gamespy matchmaking protocol, reverse-engineered by a small team and run as a community service. it brought back online play for mario kart wii and a handful of other big nintendo titles. similar fan projects appeared for older pc games. for everything else the day-of-shutdown was the day online stopped. the lesson did not really get learned. ten years later most of the post-2014 online game catalog still depends on a single publisher running a single set of matchmaking servers, with no protocol-level fallback for what happens when the lights go off.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »