Once more LGP has been hit by outages affecting companies we work with. This time, the hosting company, RapidSwitch, who own the datacenter where we host our webservers.
We would like to apologise to all customers who had their downloads affected, or who had their ability to play rental games affected. We are immediately extending the rental period of all rental games that are active now, or would have been active during the downtime, by four days to make up for the intermittant downtime.This affects rentals purchased from any LGP reseller.
We are pleased to report that players with non-rental versions of the game, both download and boxed copy, experienced no lockout. As designed, the LGP protection system coped perfectly with the outage.
The outage also affected PenguinPlay, meaning that ingame multiplayer functionality via PenguinPlay would have been unavailable.
This will also have affected our resellers who sell downloadable copies of games, and request download keys dynamically. If any of your customers received blank keys, please contact us at support@linuxgamepublishing.com, and we will fix the problem.
Finally, on a lighter note, we would like to briefly laugh at RapidSwitch. Who as compensation for the downtime, have offered to upgrade our servers for free. Beside the fact that our servers are fully loaded and not upgradeable any further, I am still waiting for their reply to my question of why on earth did they think that appropriate compensation for extended downtime is – effectively – more downtime. I’ll summarise their response in a comment as and when it is received.
Tags: downtime, DRM, PenguinPlay, rapidswitch, rental
Good thing the games still worked, although I still dislike the DRM. :(
I was already wondering why the LGP site was down.
Btw. I just finished Shadowgrounds and it was pretty nice.
Old style boss-fights, nice story, nice map design.
And now that I’ve finished it I’m kind of curious about the story of Shadowgrounds: Survivor. The “Survivor” might be connected to the aliens, hm, who knows, soon I’ll see.
It also did not crash anymore, so it just crashed once while playing it through, in three days.
It does not seem to close down properly though. I started it through the terminal and ended it through the game menu and the process is still there.
When I first saw SG I though it was all just about shooting hordes of aliens and never though that it would have such a nice and planned through story.
(although all the technical stuff that failed got kind of tiring after a while…)
The relatively good voiceover also is a huge plus.
So it’s me again. This ain’t quite connected to the blog entry, but this is also almost the only place to write such things.
Did you ever consider porting Majesty 2? I’ve just seen a few videos of it and it looks like something I’d definitely enjoy to play. I don’t know whether it was made by the same developer as Majesty or if someone just bought the rights… but if it was the same developer, you should already have some connections there, eh?
I’m also still waiting for X: Beyond the Frontier and Startopia. :P Since you already said that both won’t be ported by LGP (understandable for X obviously, Startopia is something that doesn’t quite age though :P[but you did not say anything about the reasons either, so it might have been MF not being reachable or MF not being willing to agree on a port or some other rightholder not agreeing or you being xenophobic with those poor poor aliens]), I contacted Mucky Foot a while back, concerning their position to a release of the Startopia source code, I did not receive an answer though. It was about 8 weeks ago. Either they don’t read their mail anymore, not too often or they did not bother to respond…
(its also very unlikely that they release their source code because someone asks, generally source releases are initiated by employees of the concerned company)
If the Startopia source would be released, I’d gladly sacrifice my free-time to port it.
I’m almost feeling like a little child on Christmas eve, waiting for the announcement of that yet unannounced LGP title…I’m pretty confident that I’m gonna like it though. You seem to have a good hand in picking interesting titles.