By now you have likely heard about the upcoming shutdown of Gamespy’s online services. For those not following it, Gamespy is a service that provides the multiplayer component to many games from the past decade. It is being shut down at the end of this month and a slew of popular games will be affected.

The list of games affected is long and distinguished, but it is not all doom and gloom. Several games’ multiplayer components are being salvaged by transitioning to other services. For example, several 2K Games titles, such as the Civilization and Borderlands games are being ported to Steamworks from Gamespy, but the most intriguing to me is GameRanger. GameRanger is positioning itself to support many games that will be affected by the Gamespy shutdown, such as the Star Wars Battlefront series, Halo 1 and Battlefield 1942. I hope that GameRanger succeeds and manages to keep these games alive for those who enjoy them.

Many games don’t yet have a safety net for the upcoming shutdown (Crysis and Battlefield 2 are high profile examples), so there is still work to be done. Between this and Microsoft shutting down its much vilified Games for Windows Live program in July, PC gaming is in transition, but both of these changes will be good for the platform in the long run. Let’s just hope that most of our favorite games survive intact.