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?image: 214854623_009c72686e

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.