Abigail Waraker concludes her report on the state of on-line games play.
One reason why business users may be the ones playing on-line games over the Internet is that they don’t have to pay the phone bill themselves. This is a key issue in the UK where local telephone calls are not free – something American games companies have to take this into consideration when marketing in Europe. 3DO Co is concerned about this and is talking to Internet service providers to set up some kind of special payment structure before the launch of Meridian 59 in October. We don’t want players watching the clock and worrying about their phone bill because this would ruin the essence of the game. It has spoken to several Internet service providers, including Demon Internet Plc and Planet Internet Ltd, and in general the providers have shown strong interest, but 3DO has not yet decided which it will work with or what the prices will be.
Price or pleasure Kaye believes ultimately people won’t be put off by local call charges because of the appeal of the game. Mark Vange, chief technology officer at VR-1, said that while local calls are more expensive in Europe than North America, the number of European users is still up. People are not finding local call charges a barrier. They’re used to paying for local calls and are prepared to face that expense. The prices of on-line games will also be affected by the format. 3DO will se ll Meridian 59 on CD-ROM and is expected to charge a monthly fee to use the game as well. Another option is to let users download the game and pay-per-play through an Internet provider. VR-1 is doing both: We will offer the game through the strongest Internet providers in each country because they will have less latency, which is important for fast response times, said Vange. Players won’t need to have an internet account with those providers, they will be able to hook up to the game via their own ISP. Another option is for developers to work with customers directly. 3DO could put Meridian 59 on its servers worldwide to make game play in each region immediate. But Hey said he didn’t expect to see developers in general dealing directly with customers. We are content providers at the end of the day, not the medium.
Some developers have put on-line games on the Internet for free. In spring Domark Software Inc offered one level out of 18 of Big Red Racing, its new ‘wacky racing game with weird vehicles and novelty tracks’ on its World Wide Web site. The game went live 10 weeks before it hit the shops. But Domark said the experiment could have reduced rather than increased sales. There is a substantial groundswell of opinion that the future of video games is not the 64-bit Nintendo 64 games machine but the on-line multiplayer game – but the games developers and publishers are in the dark when it comes to establishing the marketing and pricing model, and nervous about the damage they could do themselves if they don’t get it right. In my opinion, the unique selling point of Big Red Racing was that it was genuinely multiplayer and we let people play their aunt on-line at no extra cost, said Paul Fox, head of communications at Domark in the UK. This may have taken the wind ou t of initial sales because people tried out the best bit first and for free, although actual sales figures were not available. We shouldn’t have made the on-line version multiplayer because that was its unique selling point. You tread a thin line between getting people excited and giving away too much for nothing, said Fox. Our advice is that playing games across the Internet is a great way to get to people you know are interested, but handle with care. So giving away the key feature for free is not the secret. But Hey said he doesn’t see putting multiplayer demos on-line as too much of a risk to his company. Free demos are necessary for marketing. Ultimately, it’s down to the quality of our games, he said. There will be ever-increasing pressure to put games on-line as there is for free demos of games at the moment, he said. Its the same as the arguments for and against game demos – although in such a young market the novelty value may make it risky. Revenue was the issue most companies focused on. Little was mentioned of bandwidth, but bandwidth will initially shape the types of game that can be played on-line. The key issue is the speed of the game across the Web, said Keith Robinson, group operations director at BCE. The data packets have to be as small as possible and this means that the games are less immediate and players won’t get an instant response. So the early successes will be strategy games like Quake and Meridian 59, where speed is not imperative. But specialist on-line games companies like VR-1 are less concerned about bandwidth. Vange said that because of the firm’s strategy of loading games on local servers and tying up with service providers that have plenty of bandwidth, its not concerned about having faster shoot ’em up games on-line. Michael Murray, director of on-line business development at Broderbund agreed. Bandwidth won’t be a problem if the players aren’t going through too many router hubs, he said. And so it comes back to the revenue model. On-line games are all in beta now. Next year the market will take off as many of those go live, said Murray. And he envisions that we will ultimately see specialist on-line games arenas where providers compete to get on-line gamers to continually come back and spend with special deals and enticements.
