Internet Gaming Has Not Yet Peaked

heartless_ writes "The Korean Game Conference is under way and Raph Koster has posted his notes on Bill Roper's keynote. According to Roper, the internet has not yet peaked. There are 1 billion Net users. That's 130,000,000 more than last year. There's a lot of growth left for online games. More, that growth number has been steady for the last few years. Bridging the gap between PC and console gamers was on tap and Koster stated in regard to the keynote... 'I don't know if the PS3 and 360 are really going to be the convergence of PC and console and online. It is encouraging to see MS announce 1m customers for Live-but really, for a lot of online games happens in the first few hours.'" Additionally, with no central service for the PS3 will that many people make the jump online when the console launches?

Comments

130 million?

[FirienFirien]

I wonder how many of those 130 million are zombies. I also wonder how they track what counts as a 'user', especially with dynamic IPs, remote logins, and so on. "According to Bill Roper" is a little ungenerous with numerical credibility.

Central Devices/Product Placement

[klausboop]

How to articulate this? How about, "Hey, game makers! You want more online gamers? Then don't make us pay subscriptions to special-purpose servers and instead let people host their own games for free." I mean, that was part of why Quake pwned the world, right? You could set up your own servers with unique maps and rules and stuff. And sure, you could, optionally, pay somebody like Gamespy for their aggregation of all the servers they knew about for all the games they knew about. None of this XBox Live nonsense.

Of course the difficulty of this is that it reduces the number of revenue streams for the game maker. But that's addressed at least somewhat in TFA with the idea of contextual ads and such. And don't forget partnership deals like Ninteno announced with McDonald's: I believe that Nintendo will have their own special servers for their DS games, but they don't charge you to use them and I assume pay for them at least in part through their McDonald's hotspot partnership.

Product placement could be a big deal. I mean, they have done things like that before, like in Crazy Taxi where you can go to Tower Records but not FYE, and to KFC but not McDonald's. If you're connected online, those kind of things could rotate and even be location-specific. When you're playing Mario Kart on your DS, connected online, why not have track-side billboards change to a sponsor's logo? They'll know your location so why not, if they know that you're standing in a McDonald's in Chatanooga, TN at 5th and Main in the Central Time Zone at 6:30 PM, say 'WATCH THE SIMPSONS TONIGHT ON FOX 8:00 PM' or even say, 'NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK AVAILABLE AT THE STORE UP THE STREET'?

I mean, isn't that the kind of thing that Google is talking about? Why not have adsense be intelligently delivered, in a non-intrusive, context-sensitive fashion to your game? Then those folks setting up their own servers could even benefit the same way they do if they serve their own web pages with adsense. (the TFA notes an understanding that many in-game ads would not be clickable but rather more like a pay per eyeball model)