Why did everyone use gamespy before?

[_galaxy]

So I came across this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCDjNPfpUlc

And I was bambozled. Why did almost literally everyone use this service? Does everyone use proprietary now?

[Hammer Of Evil]

Początkowo opublikowane przez _galaxy:

So I came across this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCDjNPfpUlc

And I was bambozled. Why did almost literally everyone use this service? Does everyone use proprietary now?

haha, to add to the previous answers,

gamespy wasn't the only one, but it was widely adopted due to its ease of use.

there were other hosts available, and some were pretty strict about competition, too.

gamespy was convenient, and may have, at one point, had the most traffic, but others were not far behind. i had about 5 that i would use in those days, and all of them were high quality.

i think most of these hosts just naturally fell by the wayside as their services were no longer needed.

it became more and more cheap for people to host their own servers, or run a data center, so server hosting was taken over by the game companies themselves.

the only one that i know of that has stood the test of time was battle dot net from blizzard. its the same now as it was in 1998.

[_galaxy]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Hammer Of Evil:

Początkowo opublikowane przez _galaxy:

So I came across this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCDjNPfpUlc

And I was bambozled. Why did almost literally everyone use this service? Does everyone use proprietary now?

it became more and more cheap for people to host their own servers, or run a data center, so server hosting was taken over by the game companies themselves.

the only one that i know of that has stood the test of time was battle dot net from blizzard. its the same now as it was in 1998.

But not cheap enough for Ubisoft to just leave their servers on....

[omgitsbees]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Actual Vinkle Taters:

because the internet back then wasn't like it is now. it was much more decentralized in technology and on the smaller scale, while being more centralized in the backbone and larger scale.

back then, developers made all their own ♥♥♥♥, all their own networking stuff, and there wasn't the cdns of today. the backbone wasn't as commercialized as it is now, and what was there at the time was geared towards powering private corporate/business networks and the web. you couldn't just buy all the internet infrastructure to make multiplayer work. gamespy was predated by something called mplayer which was designed to make multiplayer easier for players and developers. mplayer was like twitter or youtube. it showed up, it was useful, people started using it, then companies followed. gamespy bought mplayer, started adding more features to try to make a business of it to sell use of it to developers. once the backbone became commercialized, and the major software companies started providing general-purpose software and network services aka the original "cloud", and developers started making third-party engines with in-built handling of networking software and systems, gamespy wasn't needed.

gamespy was past its heydey by 2008 or so. any controversy later on was a result of this.

This is spot on. I have my complaints about how the internet functions today, especially in online gaming, but honestly gaming in the 90s, and early 2000s really sucked.

[Heros]

Great memories of using Gamespy, playing icewind dale and bg2 with a party of 6 in to the wee small hours of the night. The welcome sound is so nostalgic to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsIAZC0C8k

Before that I used Mplayer. Warzone 2100. Good times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8kYl_u-TM4

[Satoru]

People seem to forget something critical about steam

Steam is not a store

Steam is a MIDDLEWARE company that happens to sell games

Steam's primary business model is the Steamworks Middleware platform.

Before steam if you wanted to integrate things like Achievements, multiplayer match making, chat, user profile persistence, etc. You could

1) Make all this stuff on your own
2) Pay Gamespy
3) Integrate GFWL if you were a Microsoft Studio

And thus because you know most people don't want to build from the ground up the entire infrastructure to do all this stuff, it was just easier to pay Gamespy to handle all the hard lifting for you. Or if Microsoft was your publisher you got GFWL instead.

Steamworks did the same thing Gamespy/GFWL did, but was FREE. And thus most developers simply went to Steam because you got, FOR FREE, a robust middleware platform that did basically everything Gamespy did. You sort of have to remember that giving away a middleware platform, for free, at this time was basically unheard of. Most games had a metric ton of middleware. Even HalfLife had the Havok physics engine middleware which was also part of its Source licensing cost. So for steam to give away a robust middelware platform was a game changer

So unsuprisingly developers moved away from Gamespy. This had a snowball effect as more devs went to Steam, they inevitably left Gamespy. As games left Gamespy, Gamespy lost revenue from new games integrating into their services and paying them monthly fees. It was a never ending downward spiral for Gamespy. Steam could use its revenue from teh store as well as its HalfLife sales to keep improving Steamworks. Gamespy went into a negative feedback loop as it lost revenue, it slowed improvements, which drove away revenue, which slowed improvements more, etc etc.

[Hatenit]

I used game spy for 1942, it was one of the only matchmaking sites out there, back when you rented controlled the servers, Mods oh the mods were sweet FH, 1918 gaming was fun, now its an industry ran by corporate level greed.