I couldn't have said it better myself. And there was a time when it was unthinkable that Gamespy would shut down.

As someone who primarily plays older games, Star Wars Battlefront 2 has probably made up the bulk of my online gaming experience (and a decent chunk of my gaming time overall), and I have friends who still mod it. I found gamespy to be pretty infuriating at times, but I still find it be pretty sad news.

Of course there are other options to play with friends, but some of those dedicated servers with 40-50 people were pretty fun.

This sucks a lot. I still remember the good times i spent on that Gamespy client to get some multiplayer R6 matches going.

Is GameSpy actually shutting down this time? The last time they announced "discontinuation of service" and then they just left their servers running normally. So I have to wonder, is this another round of deceitful lies followed by a whole lot of whining about nothing?

Some GameSpy game servers were shut down in December 2012, shortly after IGN sold GameSpy Technologies to Glu Mobile. This really happened and the affected games were not restored (from what I recall).

You might be thinking of the GameSpy website which was discontinued in 2013 but is still online. The GameSpy website is still owned by IGN so is now completely unrelated to GameSpy Technologies despite the shared name.

I'm thinking of master.gamespy.com which was not shut down in 2012. A handful of services were disabled for a handful of games, and there was much screaming that GameSpy was dead forever. Meanwhile every other game since 1997 worked fine. Some gamers pointed their partially disabled games to master.openspy.net for matchmaking while simultaneously continuing to use natneg1.gamespy.com for NAT negotiation. Gamers claimed that GameSpy had sucked because everybody "knew" that GameSpy had always sucked, blissfully ignorant that they were still using GameSpy.

So I wonder, is GameSpy actually shutting down master.gamespy.com for real, or are they just invalidating a few more gamenames again? I suppose it doesn't matter, because gamers these days can't tell the difference. GameSpy will be dead if fools are told to believe that GameSpy is dead.

Dungeon Defenders (all except steam versions) & Capcom games added:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/04/03/glu-shutting-down-gamespy-service-affecting-a-reported-800-developers-and-publishers.aspx

So how will you guys play the GOG version of Arma 2 multiplayer without GameSpy ? I heard the game will use Steam in the future .

Uh, yeah, people are painting this like a DRM issue, but don't DRM-free games also need some kind of DRM to play MP? I don't play MP games at all, really, so I might be wrong.

Is there a way to play MP games w/o third party services?

Well it depends. Multiplayer games can allow third-party servers by providing server software (which is the online equivalent to DRM-free if you ask me). But some are dependant on particular servers.

Some others use first party servers for authentication of accounts, etc, but allow third party servers to actually host the games. So it's complicated really.

I wonder...

Since I boycotted online activations from the very beginning, I was a bit angry after buying Unreal Tournament 3 that it wasn't mentioned ANYWHERE (not even at the Amazon ratings). May be one of those games that are killed if no community hack is written.

Having to crack games you bought to be able to play them... reminds me of the moment I tried my fresh Warcraft III back then and realized, that the DRM crashed the game and I have to use a crack...

Apart from local co-op, split screen, hotseat and things like that i don't think so. You will need some server to make the connection with the other player.

If Gamespy was not the only method for multiplayer then the game can still be played in multiplayer with tunngle for example. If it was then it's dead, same deal with games that used GFWL.

Cool, thanks for the infos. I think the server software option mentioned by ChrisSD might be the alternative people want for DRM-free MP gaming. I guess Tunngle is like that too.

what will happen with Battlefront 2? I like playing it again from time to time.

Not that it makes that much of a difference. Epic/Midway pretty much made sure to kill it stone dead from the very beginning.