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Not Enough Online Console Games?
Thanks to GameSpot for their 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the relative lack of certain online console games. The author focuses on "the fighting genre [as] the most blatant example" of this dearth, with only Capcom Vs. Snk 2 EO for Xbox currently playable online. He also mentions the PS2 as lacking depth of online titles, claiming "A steady flow of online PS2 games would have been nice. But the last one released was... wait for it... Chessmaster." Were you also expecting to be "seeing almost every game coming out with some kind of online support" by now, or are current online titles enough for you?
Only 9% of Internet traffic is due to Online gaming, that includes Console and Computers and out of that 9% only 8% is Console games the other 92% is Computer.
So You only have a really small group of people who want online games that make allot of noise about it.
MS Loses 100s of Millions of dollars on Xbox Line each quarter. Online gaming makes 0 money back. And out of all the Xbox owners out there only 10% actually have Xbox Live. Kind of sad when you think about it, especially when this is suppose to be your selling feature.
Online games just isn't a money makeing factor in this generation, maybe next gen when more users have Cable or better.
oh and just another tidbit to toss in less the 24% of people online actually have cable or better. So 76% has AOL, Earthlink, NetZero, MSN or any other 56K phone-line provider.
-------- -Cap
~Bommers, Why did it have to be Bommers!?!
I realize it may be heretical to say this, but lag isn't the heart of the problem IMO -- it's a convenient whipping boy, but for most games, lag can generally be overcome with predictability of motion, rollback, and good spatial reasoning to keep the circuits optimized.
The thing with twitch games is that there's almost no predictability for when a player will trigger a move, but there's full predictability of motion once the moves are triggered. A well-designed animation system should be able to take advantage of that to make up for late triggers. For example, a non-networked game may be designed to know the outcome of any given pair of player moves as soon as the button is pressed. Design it instead to resolve the move-pair based on late input and you're halfway there. The main artifact of latency, then, is that moves may seem to start late (as late as the late-ncy), but their ends and their results are still synchronized and well-behaved.
Just some thoughts.
Back in my days, we'd get our friends to simply come over to our house if we wanted to play a game with more than one player. We were content with only a quarter of the screen for Mario Kart 64, and dammit, we liked it that way!
I've never really been very impressed with online gaming. Unless you can actually interact with the person you're playing against, they might as well just be a computer controller opponent. And stupid add-ons like the Dreamcast microphone for Alien Front Online doesn't cut it (trust me, I have it, and it was never any good). I'm certainly not going to pay $10 a month to play against against some nerd who plays the game 25 hours a day.
The only way any console is going to succeed with online support is if the system comes with the hardware you need. PC's generally come with what they need (or you got it anyways because you wanted the internet), and online gaming seems pretty successful for computer. The Dreamcast came with a modem, and there were quite a few games that supported it (although some of the support was a little odd, like downloading ghost cars in racing games, or downloading "fighting data" in Street Fighter Alpha 3). If Sony and Microsoft want their new hardware to have big online followings, they have to include this stuff with the system, because 80% of the owners are casual and probably won't bother to buy any goofy accessories.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
We were working on online gaming at Midway before my team was laid off. After killing off Wavenet (networked arcade games, I came on just as it died), the business heads put us to work on MTN (Midway Tournament Network). After they killed that too, we started working on XBOX and PS2 network stuff, but by then most of us had been laid off. Midway had decided that networking would not be a big thing in the game market for another 5-7 years. (this was in 2001) Maybe they were right? Lag is my biggest problem when playing online. Playing head to head twitch games is not so much fun when your commands preceed your character's actions by a noticeable interval. There is only so much you can do in software to make up for lag conditions, any game that has a critical timing element will suffer at some point. Some games are just not very networkable.
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