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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?
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.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
It states that the internet has not yet peaked, not online gaming. For all we know almost everyone who wants to play videogames online already does.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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)
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
The last 50 feet... from the router to the television.
Sure, many techies and early adopters have either network cables or wireless access covering the whole house. But the "average joe" gamer has his internet connection in one part of the house (where he has a desk to set the computer at), and his TV w/ game consoles in another part of the house (where he can set his butt down at). It's often not the easiest task to get an internet connection from one to the other, especially if you have kids/a spouse/pets to keep the wires safe and invisible from.
Hopefully with the new consoles and with the increasingly cheaper costs to go wireless, this will not be as big of a problem in the future, but until this is resolved, online gaming will still only compromise a small percentage of the installed console customer base.
Internet gaming is only going to get worse. Recently I decided not to play online any more (not even with my DS) because I'm so sick of assholes using every bug and ceat they can to win at all costs. They have no sense of honour at all so I see no reason to waste my time with them.
More and more people are getting sick of these assholes and as time goes by the decent players will give up and online games will be left with scum playing against scum.
I like muppets.
I haven't played an open online game since UT2k3 was released. It's simply not worth the aggravation that griefers bring with them.
The only bits that are mine in that article are the bits in [[]]. Everything else was Bill. So the comment about convergence is not me but Bill Roper.
It seems like wireless access is becoming more and more prevalent. My mother asked me about getting WiFi when I talked to her last night - sign no. 1 when a technology has hit the mainstream.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
I guess this will become much easier when broadband wireless access becomes prevalent (WIMAX, Flarion etc) since it will just be another USB dongle to plug in teh back of the Xbox360 or PS3.
No need to configure security, that's all done by the service provider...
Yes wireless is the way to go, though my router is right next to the TV.