2K Games announced Tuesday, April 22, that online services for "Borderlands" and "Civilizations" will be temporarily unavailable to make way for a seamless transition into the Steamworks platform.
With GameSpy's servers set for permanent shutdown on May 31, 2K Games' biggest franchises are slated for transfer to the Steamworks servers. The company, however, did not specify a timetable for the transition.
The temporary downtime will affect the original "Borderlands," "Civilization 3" and "Civilization 4", along with the all expansions of the Sid Meier titles. 2K Games is also assessing the feasibility of migrating "Civilization Revolution" and "Borderlands" PS3 version to other servers.
"During the transition, players will experience interruption of several features, including online play, matchmaking and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)," the company said in a statement posted on the 2K Games blog.
It added that offline play will not be affected by the transition.
While "Borderlands" and "Civilizations" will not lose functionality with GameSpy closing down, 2K Games announced that a handful of its legacy games for PC will be going with Game Spy, including "Rune," "Close Combat First to Fight" and "Stronghold 2."
It will also discontinue online services for "NHL 2K10" for Wii and "Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution" for Nintendo DS.
The full list of affected titles can be viewed on the 2K Games website.
Other game developers, including Electronic Arts, Activision, Epic Games, Gearbox and Bohemia Interactive have also announced that many of their games will survive the GameSpy shutdown.
Crytek, however, said that Crysis and Crysis 2 multiplayer mode will no longer be available starting May 31.
"The conclusion of online multiplayer support comes as a result of GameSpy Technology shutting down all their hosting services," said the company in a statement on its official forum.
"GameSpy have been providing multiplayer functionality for Crysis and Crysis 2 since they launched. The single-player campaigns in both games are unaffected by this transition, and the multiplayer mode in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Crysis 2 remain playable," Crytek added.
GameSpy is a matchmaking middleware for online games. Around 800 game studios have hosted their titles on GameSpy since it was launched in 1996. In 2000, IGN acquired GameSpy, whose new owner decided to discontinue all secondary websites including the newly acquired company.
"Effective May 31st, 2014, GameSpy will cease providing all hosted services for all games still using GameSpy. If you have any questions about how this impacts your favourite title, please contact the game's publisher for more information. Thanks for a great ride!" reads a statement on the GameSpy website.
