I've seen this coming for many many years.

Most people have forgotten how Valve held millions of gamers hostage and pointed a gun at their head going "now download Steam and start playing or say bye bye to playing Counter Strike online" when they suddenly shut down WON with Steam being the only alternative. And to remind you, Steam was a HORRIBLE POS back then, barely functioning and many people being unable to install it not to mention that it pushes the minimum requirements of all WON games up quite a lot, making the games unplayable for thousands of gamers.

CS could be played on a Pentium 166 back in 2000 but when they introduced Steam, it suddenly ran terrible on a Pentium II 266! All because they changed the engine to work with Steam.

Anyway, the point of the story is that you never know what could happen to online aspects of games and DRM is only going to make this a worse problem in the future when the servers handling authentication and verification will be pulled down or replaced and old games will effectively be killed off en masse.

I am not a multiplayer gamer although i do dabble in mmos now and again so the closure dosent affect me much but still sucks that this is happening the fact they are telling publisher you need to give us so much money to maintain servers for old games is crazy and the way they are shutting servers down without letting people know is even worse.

Servers costs money. Somebody has to pay for them. Gamespy wouldn't shut anything down if it was still profitable. What should they do? Start a subscription service? I would be for it, but consider the backlash that would create.

The problem is never somebody shutting down their servers. The problem is when authentication and matchmaking are locked up in proprietary systems and licensed to somebody. Then even if players can host it's difficult or impossible to join servers. But these companies almost always sit on the software with the assumption they will be destroying potential value by giving it away. Sometimes they lose track of it.

The only thing that can stop this practice is a law that punishes it, but more people have to care for that to happen, and even gamers don't care. We are polluted with apathy, trolls, and phony libertarians who jump at the chance to whiteknight for any corporate interest.

Old thread but it' finally is over. Remember when GS was Da Shit back in the days? :(
Damn it, no more NOLF multiplayer :s Come one gog we need nolf on gog so we can get some more multiplayer action on different hosts...
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/03/gamespy-multiplayer-shutting-down-hundreds-of-games-at-risk

So what all GOG games are still reliant on Gamespy for multiplayer? I saw NWN floated, what else?