Just in case anyone missed the announcement,
That’s disappointing. I suppose if there are to be no more updates to EE it won’t be too bad. I don’t use it to run the game but do to update. And then my workflow pulls from the beamdog lib area…
Gee, if it isn’t this completely inavoidable result I was saying to people would happen…
[edit]: I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but while most companies have a desire to keep people in their own little walled gardens, some for good purpose, others for purposes more nefarious, there is a considerable amount of infrastructure involved in doing so, and regardless of how good or bad such a service is, most inevitably go the way of the dodo. Even Activision Blizzard’s starting to put their stuff back on Steam with Diablo IV (though that may have as much to do with its lacklustre reception post-launch, to be fair.)
[edit2]: I wonder if they will be offering GOG keys too - you can only have one key per Steam account, but I and others in my position keep two, one they use for playing, and one they use for DMing. Personally I seperated them by having one on GOG and on on Steam, but I must imagine others just got two direct from BD.
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Exactly the same situation here; what do they plan on doing for folks that own and want to own both? (As an aside, apparently I own a GOG key too, so I guess I’m SOL–why do I have so many keys for this game.)
Also, does this open the possibility of running into a second Master Authentication issue like what happened when Bioware slowly shut down?
What about https://nwn.beamdog.net/? Is there any guaranteed obligation to keep these running?
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Thanks for bringing this news here as I would never have known otherwise. Now I am taking the time to update BGEE, BG2EE, SoDEE, IWDEE, PSTEE 
If the master servers go down I suppose we’re back to the dark ol’ days. Though there is a replacement master server project on the vault - not sure how that’s going, but we may need it soon!
Don’t be so pessimistic or I’ll send the taco unicorn with its rainbows!
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What does “We’re going to sunset” mean?
“How could they know just what this message means?
The end of my hopes, the end of all my dreams.”
Actually I got a Steam key, so no dreams will end for me.
It means that the Client will disappear soon, like a setting sun.
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Did Lathendar bless this sundown
My old Nwn EE dev PC (W7 + Athlon X64 !) with a rusted Beamdog client version has been Kaput for some years now. Did someone know how to grab the last EE version from Beamdog while it lasts, knowing that i am a Debian/KDE user now. I intend to archive the EE Windows files for the time needed to build/rebuild a new Windows PC. I got no Steam or Gog accounts. Thanks for all suggestions !
Probably not. Lathander is the Morning Lord.
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I see a bit of confusion in some posts here that I think stems from folks just being used to DRM and other anti-feature crap that most games have.
NWN is not most games. NWN was designed to be user-friendly, so:
- There is no DRM (except cdkey/masterserver for PW play)
- It does not need steam, gog or anything else to be installed
- it doesn’t need to be installed at all, you can just copy the game files between machines, or run it from a usb stick.
In fact there is no difference between GoG/steam/BDC and Windows/Linux/macOS version at all. They are byte-per-byte identical. You always get the binaries for all three platforms. The GOG version comes with steam integration (and vice versa) so you can get achievements on steam that way.
This means that owning multiple versions of the game is mostly useless, except for having multiple cdkeys for online play - which just means you should store your cdkey somewhere.
With BDC gone, all you need is another way to update the game. Steam is by far the best here as it allows you to easily switch between all versions of the game (including preview alpha patches). But if you don’t want to install a closed source program for this (though both nwn and bdc are also closed source), GOG offers “offline installers”, which is just some complexity around a zip file of the game data. Or, you can just ask a friend to send you their game files 
By the way, BDC is/was really just a bittorrent client, and you can use any other client to download the game. But I guess what sunsetting means here is that they’ll stop publishing the torrents as well.
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Oh, and as for the master server, there’s infrastructure and a process ready to migrate to a community one if BD ever stops supporting it. But there’s no reason for them to do so unless the whole studio shuts down. I imagine it costs less than $10/month to run.
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Useless or not, those that nonetheless own multiple legal copies of the game are very likely to get shafted by this decision.
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How so?
If you want to use a different cdkey you can just change it in Documents/Neverwinter Nights/cdkey.ini
Or, if you want to run 2+ clients with different CDKeys you can make a shortcut to nwmain.exe and point it at different user directories that have their own cdkey.ini using -userdirectory some/path
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Right, what Daz says, I don’t see how you’d get shafted. But if there is a specific concern, best voice it now so we can bring it to BD early, since they certainly didn’t set about to shaft anyone.
For what it’s worth, I own 26 copies of NWN on beamdog.com… But I just use the single steam copy out of convenience.
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As long as you don’t actually start the game from Steam that will work. But if I recall the Steam client overwrites the key with your official steam key. (Maybe at client startup or maybe when you launch the game, it’s been a while…)
But yes. I confirmed last night that I could update the game in steam and run it from the command line so it’ll just be a bit of changing scripts.
How are you retrieving the keys once the client is gone?