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Role Playing (Games) The Internet

Internet Gaming Has Not Yet Peaked 26

Posted by Zonk from the online-is-the-best-line dept.
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?
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Internet Gaming Has Not Yet Peaked More

Internet Gaming Has Not Yet Peaked

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  • 130 million? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FirienFirien ( 857374 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @12:54PM (#13999333) Homepage
    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.

  • Misleading article summary (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @12:57PM (#13999384)
    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.
    • True.

      Another point to bare in mind would be the prevalence of MMOs and the like. Those of us (no..not me...honest!) who are harcore players are already playing - to the point where we either do not have the time or inclination to play anything else! No room for growth there!

      Of course, what with the DS wireless stuff and all this could soon change.....
    • "For all we know almost everyone who wants to play videogames online already does."

      Yes, for all we know, that is true. But, the number of people who want to play videogames online is growing faster than those people are dying off (this will continue for the next several decades, until the babyboomers croak).

      Also, the number of people with access to the internet for gaming is growing. So I don't think we can say that the online videogame market isn't continuing to grow.

  • Central Devices/Product Placement (Score:3, Interesting)

    by klausboop ( 322537 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @01:20PM (#13999679)
    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)

  • One of the big obstacles to console gaming online: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Turken ( 139591 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @01:39PM (#13999917)
    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.
    • 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.
      I really wonder how bad the cheating will be with the DS. Sure lag might be a problem but I can't see how their can be cheating unless some odd things happen.
      • ### Sure lag might be a problem but I can't see how their can be cheating unless some odd things happen.

        Just look at MarioKart64, it had numerous bugs that allow you to cheat on tracks, ie. reverse directly after start, drop down some cliff and wait till you are placed back on track, if you then drive through the finish you have done a lap, repeat that a few times and you can beat the track in 20 seconds. If similar bugs pop up in MarioKartDS and are used a lot, it could make the game a lot less fun.

        • Re:Ha! (Score:2, Insightful)

          by nmaster64 ( 867033 )
          Nintendo wouldn't let a bug that big get out in one of their biggest titles ever. And if there were any big ones, the testers would have found them by now...remember, testers have been playing MKDS for a couple weeks now. A bug like that wouldn't have gone undiscovered...

          I'm so excited about Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection, it's just implemented so well. Their nintendowifi.com is a very well-built, easy to navigate site. And allowing you to see all the stats and things, as well as track your own stats...it's al
          • ### Nintendo wouldn't let a bug that big get out in one of their biggest titles ever.

            Well, they sure would fix it when they notice it before the release, the problem is that such kind of bugs are extremly hard to find.

            ### And if there were any big ones, the testers would have found them by now...remember,

            A dozend of testers can't replace hundreds of thousands of players. The throuble is that even a little bug, that you wouldn't care at all about in a singleplayer game, can be fatal in a multiplayer game. Su
            • Of course I think a small bug might be able to get through, your right of course about a few dozen testers not being able to replace millions of gamers. But you have to remember that this is Nintendo's flagship Wi-fi title, I have a feeling it went through a lot more strenuous work than your standard game...and of course any known bug in one of their previous Mario Kart games will be checked, so you won't see any of those...

              Yeah, and I was thinking about that patching too. Since the DS uses SD-technology fo
              • ### Yeah, and I was thinking about that patching too. Since the DS uses SD-technology for their games, I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible to just update the card. Seems easy enough...

                The DS doesn't use SD-technology, the carts are still completly unrewritable ROM things. The largest rewritable Flash in DS games so far is Nintendogs with 2Mbit(256kb), they could of course use a equally large Flash in MarioKart, if that is enough for patching the game or if it will be used at all for patching however has
                • Sorry, I meant to say flash tech (in my defense, I was loading pictures off my camera's SD card while I was typing that). But, just like you said, they are read-only ROM's, so it all depends on the flash space available.

                  If you think about how a patch would work on such a platform, it seems hard to manage it using such little space unless you planned for it in the original coding. For instance, what if you wrote the game using numerous tiny config files, and left them in the flash area, and used reference

  • 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.

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