America\'s Army axed

Mac gamers won't be seeing any future versions of America's Army, the free team-based first person shooter developed and sponsored by the U.S. Army. Ryan Gordon, programmer for the Mac version of the game confirmed that he is no longer working on the project. "I'm now paid for just the Linux server. The Mac and Linux clients were cancelled several versions ago," Gordon said. The programmer continued to work on the project even after the Army withdrew funding for the Linux and Mac clients, following a hike in licensing fees from GameSpy and other middleware developers, according to Macworld. Although Gordon replaced the GameSpy game matching code with an alternative last year, he decided that paying projects and other work take precedence over free updates to an unsupported project. "Future versions of the game will be adding more middleware that I can't keep up with and for which no one will be footing the bill," Gordon said. "The Army, I think, probably sees these freebie ports as a nuisance, since they're almost always late, and all they see are complaints from the Mac and Linux users about delays in a project they thought they axed several releases ago."

by MacNN Staff