Black Raven Dragoons

[Grimblast]

Well this article answered my concerns about online multiplayer with the first Borderlands game. Silly companies should've done this a long time ago.

[Zancarius]

As if GfWL wasn't a shot across the bow. Any company not currently using Steamworks (at least) is foolish, if not stupid.

What's sad is the shear number of games that will be rendered unplayable after June and (unlike 2K) those companies outright refuse to migrate to the Steamworks API.

I guess we should be thankful for small miracles. So few companies used Gamespy as it was for their online services that transitioning to something more stable over the long term was probably a fairly minimal investment. Although 2K is smart--they know people are still buying Borderlands (the first one). Everyone else seems willing to just toss their IP into the garbage.

Remember Bulletstorm? I forgot that was another GfWL game. The parent company has already stated they have no plans to migrate it to anything else and are quite happy to just let it rot.

Here's a question: What's stopping them from stripping out defunct APIs, spending a week or two to reimplement it on Steam, and then put it up for sale? Why did they even go as far as to take the games off Steam entirely? Isn't it better to (worst case) drop the price to $5 and sell it making something off the investment as opposed to basically saying "I'm gonna take my ball and go home!"

Do these companies just not want money?

[Grimblast]

Remember that Scourge Project game you gave me sometime back? It uses gamespy for its multiplayer but after all these years, they made a newer version of the game and made it work through steam. I got the email last night and was shocked to see they gave me the new version free in my steam library. The new version apparently is way better than the old one which was buggy. It should show up in your library as Scourge Outbreak I believe.

[Zancarius]

Yep, I remember seeing the popup notice for that, which was curious. Apparently it only took them about 2 years to figure out that if they fix their game, people might actually buy it.

Yet for every company like that, there's dozens that feel their IP is so important to them, they'd rather take it offline and not sell it than to port it to Steamworks and put it up on sale.

Someone wrote CodeMasters some time back about Fuel (random open world racing game), and their response was essentially: It's an old game, we have no intention of porting our old games to Steamworks, and only our two newest games MIGHT be fixed. The game came out in 2009.