GameSpy is Back?

With PAX having a very strong turnout, bringing people from all over the world and all sectors of the gaming industry, there was one face I was surprised to see: GameSpy. For some of us older PC gamers, that name conjures up memories of Planet Quake, Planet Unreal and GameSpy 3D, the multiplayer server finding software which is attributed for the namesake. Now last I checked, this isn’t 1998 and the GameSpy brand, which was once a household name, has fallen to the wayside. As it turns out, they are pushing their way back into the game networking market.

GameSpy certainly has not dropped off the map completely since the late 90’s; the GameSpy Network consists of several game industry news sites and file distribution services like FilePlanet. Their matchmaking service, GameSpy 3D, however has certainly seen better days. As it turns out, they’ve been working recently to penetrate the networking layer of the gaming industry. With GameSpy Technology, developers can utilize the same networking middleware across all gaming platforms.

This technology has been used in several games which have been released over the past several years: Civilizations V, Borderlands, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Crysis 2, and so on. One of the most recent games showcasing the technological advantages that GameSpy provides is Dungeon Defenders. Trendy utilized GameSpy in order to support cross platform play across iOS devices, Android, PS3 and PC (Microsoft wouldn’t allow it in their XBLA version). This means that if you are playing a copy of Dungeon Defenders on an iPhone, you can join and play with someone playing it on their PC.

GameSpy Technologies isn’t only a network peering service, but also a tool that developers can use to improve the quality and uniformity of a player’s experience. In the Dungeon Defenders example, your character data is stored online on the GameSpy cloud. This makes your saved progression available to you from any other copy of Dungeon Defenders regardless of platform. You can play on your PC, leave the house, hop on the bus and then continue on your iPhone.

Another tool that developers can take advantage of is the statistics gathering and storage that GameSpy offers. With everyone using the same networking middleware, you can easily track and store statistics on the GameSpy cloud for later analysis or to provide the end users with leader boards or other interesting bits of data. This certainly sounds like a very expensive set of tools given the variety and depth that GameSpy is offering, but they are conscious of the large surge of indie developers and have an option available for those micro studios.

Being able to have a cohesive experience on a game across multiple platforms that allows peering across all of these platforms is an exciting prospect. With multiplayer and social gaming becoming more prominent, developers should be taking advantages of technology that allows all of your customers to connect to each other. Even titles that falter on one platform can still have a competent multiplayer society across other platforms making the choice between a PS3 or PC copy less stressful. Now we’ve just got to get Microsoft to play nice with others, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.