Online Multiplayer Gaming has since its inception been dependent upon another multi million dollar industry, the Game Server hosting industry. Something of a niche within a niche, Game Servers companies have been around since day 1, making eSports possible but for how much longer?
The stalwart titles/series of online FPS gaming such as Quake, Counter Strike, RTCW, Battlefield & Call of Duty have all gone down the road of requiring people to host servers for their games. They might throw up a few just to get the ball rolling but at the end of the day it has always been the GSP's that have filled the void. Don’t get me wrong, the GSP's aren’t filling the void out of the goodness of their own heart - they're doing it to make money and some of them make a lot of money!
There are a handful of big GSP's the likes of Game-Hosting, Multiplay, I3D for example who handle up to 40,000 slots for players. They charge anything between €0.50 and €2 for each slot and when you think they might have 40,000 of those you can start to imagine the revenues that are available for a budding Game Server company. It is ofcourse not that straight forward, everyone on Crossfire has seen the rise of YCN over the past 18/24 months and their efforts though raising the profile of their company have gone over some bumpy roads, anyone who thinks running a GSP is straight forward need think again! However is that road set to get even bumpier for them?
The upcoming release of Modern Warfare 2 see's one of the biggest FPS franchise move to the privately hosted model. No dedicated server option, meaning no server sales. Last years release of Quake Live also saw all servers move privately hosted by ID Software. EA's Battlefield franchise requires licenses which limit the amount of GSP's offering ranked servers, a tactic also employed by SplashDamage for ET:Quakewars. The writing may have been on the wall when it was first announced the Doom 3 would have p2p matches rather than dedicated servers, but that games failure to deliver that technology bought the industry at least 2 more years - however there is an ugly reality that its getting hard to host gameservers these days.
The more interesting question is why are developers trying to take back control of this industry? ID Software have already announced that at some point in the future they will charge a small amount for Quakelive, it could be argued that is because the ingame advertising simply isn’t paying the bills like it might have been expected. Ingame advertising in both Quakelive and CounterStrike has proven unsellable when viewing how much inventory remains unsold. Can Infinity Ward do what ID Software and Valve cant? Its not been suggested yet that the creation of IW.net is for advertising purposes, but one cannot see why else they'd take on such an overhead.
The only reason for optimism is the success that Blizzard have had with Battle.net, for some reason Blizzard decide to continually foot the bill for 10 year old games like Starcraft and offer the occasional patch and yearly Blizzcon events with big prizefunds...however we all know that Infinity Ward is no Blizzard - in 5 years after MW2 revenue stream is all dried up (if not sooner), do you think they'll still be hosting and paying for gameservers for it?
Personally I feel that the GSP's have been responsible for a lot of growth in the eSports sector. Multiplay's LAN series or YCN's sponsorship of regular tournaments here on CF (not to mention CC6!) makes me feel personally if it aint broke, don’t fix it.
The stalwart titles/series of online FPS gaming such as Quake, Counter Strike, RTCW, Battlefield & Call of Duty have all gone down the road of requiring people to host servers for their games. They might throw up a few just to get the ball rolling but at the end of the day it has always been the GSP's that have filled the void. Don’t get me wrong, the GSP's aren’t filling the void out of the goodness of their own heart - they're doing it to make money and some of them make a lot of money!
There are a handful of big GSP's the likes of Game-Hosting, Multiplay, I3D for example who handle up to 40,000 slots for players. They charge anything between €0.50 and €2 for each slot and when you think they might have 40,000 of those you can start to imagine the revenues that are available for a budding Game Server company. It is ofcourse not that straight forward, everyone on Crossfire has seen the rise of YCN over the past 18/24 months and their efforts though raising the profile of their company have gone over some bumpy roads, anyone who thinks running a GSP is straight forward need think again! However is that road set to get even bumpier for them?
The upcoming release of Modern Warfare 2 see's one of the biggest FPS franchise move to the privately hosted model. No dedicated server option, meaning no server sales. Last years release of Quake Live also saw all servers move privately hosted by ID Software. EA's Battlefield franchise requires licenses which limit the amount of GSP's offering ranked servers, a tactic also employed by SplashDamage for ET:Quakewars. The writing may have been on the wall when it was first announced the Doom 3 would have p2p matches rather than dedicated servers, but that games failure to deliver that technology bought the industry at least 2 more years - however there is an ugly reality that its getting hard to host gameservers these days.
The more interesting question is why are developers trying to take back control of this industry? ID Software have already announced that at some point in the future they will charge a small amount for Quakelive, it could be argued that is because the ingame advertising simply isn’t paying the bills like it might have been expected. Ingame advertising in both Quakelive and CounterStrike has proven unsellable when viewing how much inventory remains unsold. Can Infinity Ward do what ID Software and Valve cant? Its not been suggested yet that the creation of IW.net is for advertising purposes, but one cannot see why else they'd take on such an overhead.
The only reason for optimism is the success that Blizzard have had with Battle.net, for some reason Blizzard decide to continually foot the bill for 10 year old games like Starcraft and offer the occasional patch and yearly Blizzcon events with big prizefunds...however we all know that Infinity Ward is no Blizzard - in 5 years after MW2 revenue stream is all dried up (if not sooner), do you think they'll still be hosting and paying for gameservers for it?
Personally I feel that the GSP's have been responsible for a lot of growth in the eSports sector. Multiplay's LAN series or YCN's sponsorship of regular tournaments here on CF (not to mention CC6!) makes me feel personally if it aint broke, don’t fix it.
And guess what, recently Codemasters shut down all servers. Leaving players without multiplayer. Tho it's not huge multiplayer title, yet it clearly demonstrates what company's can do if they keep up with this new console-tendency.
I see the future of gaming, and it says "Fuck you."
Now imagine that COD9 comes out in 2012 and there are still 5,000 guys playing COD6 online every day..
How can you sell an extra 5,000 copies of COD9 ???
EA apparently shut down all online 2006 sports titles in September 2007:
http://news.filefront.com/electronic-arts-to-shut-down-all-online-2006-sports-titles/
The problem is that we still think that we buy games, when in reality we buy a license to play them online for a year or two. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if they put the end-of-life notice on the box so that consumers knew what they were paying for.
Game developers killing eSports, how's that for irony?
someone wrap this up in a sentence
In ET, splashdamage (or Id) could turn off the master server which would kill the ingame browser, but it would not stop ppl from hosting servers and /connect xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
this wont be possible in the newer generations of games as they expect you to host the game on your home connection, and the only way ppl will be able to connect to your server is by going trough the IW.net authentication
or check out this video, if you can't be arsed to read: http://www.taggers.eu/flame/407
ps: boycot cod6, i repeat: do not buy this game untill they allow for dedicated servers. Brink is coming out soon , and at least for now, they claim to be listening to our needs
I understand console players dont even understand the concept of dedicated servers, and they are prolly fine with it. I cannot accept gaming turning into a the lowest common denominator of all its platforms, meaning shitty user interfaces and servers hosted on residential connections which are just plain shit to host games on (anyone playing wolf beta over hamachi can testify to this)
But I can appreciate boycotting out of principle.
but with the 10 year old engine I guess it will be a little outdated :P
that would be so sad :D
MW2 will allegedly have p2p matches. That means no GSP can benefit from this. There won't be any servers at all. But QL, BF and ETQW do have dedicated servers, albeit with a license system or in general selected by the developer. That does mean income by respectable GSP's who have worked their way up to supply a very good service to the customer.
The reason for the continuous success of battlenet is imo WoW. Blizzard are a very fine company and have yet to release their first bad game. Their loyalty to the customers has been amazing, and a big part of their success. Since they have the money, they don't mind spending some extra bucks keeping those Diablo & Starcraft players happy.
IW won't be so friendly to us gamers, time has proven that. They aim for profit only and don't give a shit about anything else.
That's why this IWNet makes so much sense. They want to control the multiplayer aspect of the game. With this system, they can control and charge everyone playing on it. The DLC's for CoD:WaW have been a great (financial) success, $70,000,000 to be exact. Now look at the success MW2 will have (possibly the biggest entertainment launch of all time), and multiply that by the cost of a DLC, and you can see the $$$ signs in IW's eyes. That's the only reason they forced this shit on the PC gamers.
Of course IW could use "ranked" dedi servers - without the option to buy private servers. That would mean GSP's who have already settled themselves (the big ones) won't have any problems with income revenue, but the smaller ones will cripple. However if this IWNet system will in fact be p2p, then a lot of GSP's will be out of business the coming months, but at least we'll be able to play multiplayer for ever...
how does p2p make it eternal ? (I am so confused after reading you :-O)
You don't need the masterserver if you have dedis right?
yeah, like bittorrent. it could never die, not even when you take away the trackers.
They are not patching Starcraft out of the kindness of their hearts, they are patching it because it is an economic no-brainer.
it's possible to run your own d2 server already, and it uses very little resources... and compared to the servers they need to keep WoW running, a few d2 servers isn't going to dent their budget at all
much like google, the "do no evil" image they project makes them richer
http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/october-news-on-patch-1.13/
Latest delay has something to do with stash size and how enlarging it might crash the servers.
To me, it looks like they're just trying to hype the shit online so more people will buy it...$$$
But I think it's an apparent move for game companies to take over one more area. Whether it is good for them or death, is another thing
i will definitly not pre-order CoD:MW2 or go to a shop on the first day after the release and buy it, like i did with Wolfailstein & CoD:WaW... (tbh i was quite dumb both times cause i played a beta in both games...but well... :D)
I will wait and read on pages like Tek-9 etc how the multiplayer is like and if there are dedicated servers etc... otherwise i won't buy it... and i guess 95% of the competitive CoD4 scene will do the same...
You say "foot the bill for some reason" but that reason is quite obviously revenue.
get a job !!!
we are the ones who give them money for their creative skills in making games with which we spend a little time having fun
now if modern games aint fun we dont buy
[on topic], the new moves on taking control over all aspects of gaming by those industries so they only care about profit and not providing fun, will ruin our fun so we must send them a message (and no the fact that et:qw or wolf or even cod5 failed wasnt a message, was only their fails)
Am I being completely ignorant to this whole nonsense?
And if you are planning on using services such as IW.net, you need a CD key for every server/player, so that puts the price of your server at around 50 GBP setup, followed by at least 30-50 GBP a month depending on your machine, for a maximum of 18 slots according to MW2 restrictions
I suppose every team could have a "6th man" and he/she could just host the game :D:D:D