Will we see more games with the same sales strategy the coming years? Will this be the answer to piracy?

FRONTLINES: FUEL OF WAR MULTIPLAYER DEMO CONFIRMED FOR XBOX LIVE!

And Kaos Studios have been listening to your feedback…

Xbox 360 owners were able to get an early taste of Frontlines: Fuel of War’s single player mode thanks to last week’s demo, but the question most people have been asking us is ‘Why isn’t there a multiplayer demo?’ Given Kaos Studios’ heritage, and the fact that Frontlines has been designed to deliver epic multiplayer gameplay supporting 32 players over Xbox LIVE in gigantic open world environments packed with next-gen weapons, drones and vehicles, that’s a pretty good question…

So we’re happy to report that a Multiplayer demo is indeed on its way to Xbox LIVE in the New Year, with a number of substantial improvements to graphics, performance and controls. Kaos have been listening very closely to feedback since the release of the single-player demo, and the results should be immediately apparent. Specifically, a slicker, consistent frame rate combined with additional graphical oomph as the code is polished for a February release date, together with a substantial improvement to the control scheme and stick sensitivity.

For a full run-down of improvements, check out Kaos Studio’s official comment to CVG.com here . If you have any feedback to add regarding the Beta or Demo, head over to the Kaos community forums here http://community.kaosstudios.com/.

Source: http://www.thq-games.com/uk/news/show/3138

Great news, I am looking forward to the first reviews of Xbox360 players. Frontlines: Fuel of War will be the first game supporting such large battles on the Xbox360 network.

Gameserver with a large number of slots have always been very popular for regular public gameplay. Games like Battlefield 2 changed online gameplay as they allowed up to 64 players on the same gameserver. Counter Strike Source even supports 64 players, although it’s a laggy experience for most players. Big servers are more expensive, but have always been the people’s choice.

New games like Team Fortress 2 and Quake Wars have been optimized for 24 players. They both limit the maximum number of players on this number, TF2 uses serverbrowser censorship, Quake Wars has been limited in the ranked server software (unranked supports up to 32 slots). Other upcoming games have also a lower limited number of maximum players. The Unreal 3 engineused in Unreal Tournament 3, Medal of Honor: Airborne and Frontlines: Fuel of war does support 64 players but not one of the three mentioned games uses servers larger than 32 slots.

Client-server model supporting up to 64 players as provided. Also supports non-dedicated server (peer-to-peer mode) with up to 16 players.  

This specific engine does support a second networking model: a peer to peer gameserver network model that supports up to 16 players. This is primarily used on the Playstation 3 and XBOX360 version of games using this engine (ex: Gears of War).

The lack of game supporting large gameservers will be the reason Battlefield 2 will be one of the most played online FPS in the next year, at least until Battlefield 3 is released.

“Rather than providing the community partially working features we limit this for the DX10 version only. Due to the strong hardware available with DX10, server load is less and performance is increased. This ensures the pure physics and day and night cycle experience without any limitation.

Gamers with a DX10 card are able to play on DX9 servers, but with the limitation of the respective server. Vice versa it is not possible for gamers with DX9 cards to play on DX10 servers due to the limited features.”

There is a big downside on this issue. DirectX10 is only available on Windows Vista AND your videocard has to support it. This will divide the Vista gamer from the Windows XP gamer and split the community in half. I am wondering what will happen to competitive gaming, most likely clan gamers will play DirectX9 matches as Vista is highly disliked in the professional gaming scene. As for public gaming, the DirectX10 servers will become some kind of ‘premium’ servers, but will be really hard to fill unlike the DirectX9 servers, that allow anyone to join!

Another part of the job is beta testing upcoming games. This is really nice, almost every big game has a closed beta, a public beta and a public demo before the full game is released.  Playing the closed beta not only gets you in touch with the developers, but it also allows you to experience the game and estimate the popularity of the game and the time and resources you will have to invest in marketing.

The number of players in a closed beta is often below five hundred. The developers, friends, family and a select group of (marketing) partners plays the game, gives feedback on special forums and plays some more. Closed betas are great for a quick debug cycle, patching does not take long given the small number of players (and servers). Sometimes big clans are asked to join the beta to test competitive online gameplay.
The public beta is great for testing the game on a large number of different hardware/software combos. In the public beta is also time for further competitive online gameplay testing instead of the usual “public” gameplay. The demo is intended for marketing as the game should be final by the time the demo is released. Usually after the demo is released, the developers move on to the first patch and the software that’s not on the cd/dvd like serverside software.

This is a new opportunity for the company and the future is looking great! Last month we made our first steps towards hosting gameservers for the console market and it’s already paying off.

Publisher trends

Online distribution is the future: it is very useful against piracy, theft and has the ability for version control and roll-out of required updates. Valve signed deals with developers and other publishers for distribution of games on their Steam network.
EA is working hard on improving EA Link, a similar distribution model.

Microsoft is the big name in the industry without these plans. They have the foundation and knowledge to build a system like this, but it’s clear Microsoft does not try to win marketshare in the pc gaming.

Another trend is to build in statistics tracking in new online multiplayer games. EA has the Battlefield series and partnered up with Gamespy/IGN, Activision has Quake Wars and acquired Demonware for the stats processing. Valve will surely try to do the same, right now open source packages do the trick, live HLStatsX.

Microsoft

Microsoft invests heavily in DirectX development and their Games for Windows programme but does not build their own games. As the xbox console uses the same architecture and parts of the Windows OS, there are a lot of future possibilities for Microsoft to boost their hard- and software sales.

Microsoft will enable cross platform gaming on the xbox and PC in future versions, once Vista is mainstream and DirectX 10 is installed on every PC.  But in the meantime, they’ve dropped the ball and will loose big on PC gaming.

• Cross-platform enabled: play on your pc against xbox4 and playstation 5 gamers
• Integrated voice- and videochat in multiplayer games
• All games will feature online rankings to boost multiplayer gameplay
• Multi-core enabled: no more single core applications! More power for advanced AI and physics
• Paid by subscription on a monthly basis per game (pc) or platform (MS/Sony)
• PC-only games will focus even stronger on the modding community
• Apple will intoduce their own Wii-like console: casual games and technology with style
• Developers and publishers will have found a way to attract more girls to gaming: play The Sims online in a MMORPG connected to social networking sites and chat
• xFire will have to compete with Microsoft Live Messenger for Gamers
• Game publishers and news websites like IGN will try to get a spot in the console interfaces: their only PoP right now is on the internet and console gamers do no tend do browse online on their console/TV.
• Ingame advertisement will be redrawn: no more static banners, but ingame video advertisement during the pre-loading of a new round and while waiting to (re)spawn

Licensing: new developments

EA (Electronic Arts) started in the summer of 2005 with ‘ranking’-software. EA handpicked a few companies to host their special ‘ranked’-servers. These servers run a special non-public software release of the game. This way, EA could ensure a basic level of quality of the gameserver, quality of support and made sure the ranked servers are considered a premium service.
The same goes for the game America’s Army, the special Honor servers are very pricy, but in return the gamer has several ingame improvements like their own soldier to earn new ranks, even while playing on other Honor servers.
This improves the lifespan of a game dramatically. Instead of playing every single round again and again as a separate play, the game becomes a tour of duty where you will be rewarded for your actions in previous games. Every round on every server is tracked by a special masterserver who keeps score for all players. This masterserver also authorizes every single server.

The future will bring a lot more online licensed games like Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. Not only for gameplay improvements, but the license fees are becoming a stable source of income. Thousands of servers online times ten to thirty dollars per game. It’s not big money like the sales of DVD games, but enough to ensure the future of the online game.

The bright side of licensing

Licensing has a few advantages:

• Enforce a basic level of quality by contract or agreement
• Possibility to deny a license to illegal ‘companies’ or amateur companies
• Cut down the player to server ratio to make sure more gamers play on each server
• Monthly license fee income ensures the future of the game
• Marketing: official servers sell better
• Corrupt or hacked servers can easily be shutdown

The downside

Licensing also has downsides. The publisher has control over every single gameserver. This means they can destroy competition in a country by creating a monopoly on the gameserver market. We’ve seen this happen in Germany, the UK and France where EA only gave one gamehoster the right to host Battlefield 2. Prices in these countries were triple the price elsewhere. No wonder most consumers rented their server in other countries. This can be prevented by regulating the pricing in the agreement or by creating an European market, a market comparable in size to the USA, instead of running a different programm for each country in Europe.
The customers in Europe do not care for borders, it’s the internet, it’s borderless. When will the major publishers find out?

Second, licensed gameservers tend to have a higher pricing because next to hardware, software, traffic, datacenter, support and overhead costs, the hoster has to pay the license fee.

Third, when licensing partners are picked, publishers tend to favour the commercially best candidate. This can be prevented by completing a technical background check on the licensing partners. The publisher should have the technical knowledge inhouse (“Linux, what’s that?”).

Doom scenario: Licensing per gamer

PC gaming always has been unique, but this could change pretty quickly. As games become more online based (some games don’t even have a single player mode anymore!) a new licensing scheme could be introduced in the traditional FPS games. Just like Microsoft Live or Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, pc gaming could change into a model where the gamer has to be buy the game (1) and buy an online subscription service (2). In this case the developer or publisher hosts their own gameservers which means less control over the online gameplay for the player. Gamers can’t administrate their servers, can’t create a custom mapcycle and can’t kick/ban vulgar or cheating people.
Also, we will see a lesser quality of service as we’ve seen with Live or WoW where overloaded servers and only a small number of geographically locations is common. If the nearest server location is in a different country, don’t those people have an unfair advantage?
Last but not least, it will be the destruction of the modding community, the scene of fanatic gamers developing new maps and new gameplay modifications.

This doom-scenario is still years away from reality, but this will become practice over time. However, the serverside license enforcement is already becoming much more common these days, which is a good thing.

The situation nowadays

Nowadays the quality of service gamehosting companies offer ranges from exceptional to ‘the crappiest experience ever’. The problem is the most games can be hosted by almost anyone with basic server knowledge and this results in gamehosters without business license, in gamehosters without advanced technical knowledge and gamehosters overbooking their servers trying to make profit. Most hosting companies start as a little private project, only a few of them survive the first three years, only a few will become a professional company that brings an addition to the market.

Automation & brain drain 

Recent developments are the releases of various gamehosting controlpanels and dedicated hosters enabling their customers to install gameservers automatically on their dedicated servers. The problem of these developments is they will lower the bar for any hosting company. It’s easier to start (re)selling gameservers, you don’t need any knowledge, not even basic serverside commands, and support. Support is clicking on controlpanel buttons and when that doesn’t work, well, you’re on your own.
Most gamehosting controlpanels allow the setup of unlicensed illegal voiceservers, like Ventrilo 2.1.4 or Teamspeak. In case of Teamspeak, the hosting company has to take care of the license on their own; Teamspeak software does not enforce licensing. In case of Ventrilo, this software requires a license to run, but this was not build in until versions after 2.1.4.
A legit company pays the license fees, 90% of the companies running this software just doesn’t. Future versions of Teamspeak will include a better licensing enforcement.

The problem

The problems I see are:

• Bad quality of service because of the lack of professionalism in the start-up ‘companies’
• Bad quality of service because of the gamehosting controlpanels 
• Licensing problems: illegal hosting to cut back the costs

Tomorrow I will discuss the most probable solution for these problems.
(Continue reading)