No problem, except the website startpagina.nl used to be a website like dmoz.org and used to have quality links. Now the website is filled with links to 404 pages and companies that went out of business years ago.
And the webmaster of the startpagina subsite? He’s connected to one of the new smaller GSPs added on the site.

GSPs and ethics

More people in the gamehosting business have a complete lack ethics and this is a direct cause of the mistrust of customers in the companies. On our helpdesk this has a direct influence on the customer contact; customers think they’re dealing with a one man company, customers think they won’t have to pay the invoices and some even try to order our services to see if we deliver without being paid. Fraudulent orders are up to 25% during school holidays.

While trying to compete with the other GSPs many of the smaller companies try to look big: they say they own their own datacenter, have 10+ employees and announce they host a tenfold of servers as in reality. This messes up the customer experience so bad they distrust the complete gamehosting business. It takes great investment in customer service to convince the customer of the quality we can offer.

A year ago I wrote a column for Dutch game website Gamert. It tells the story of a GSP review website. Three months after the website went life, over half the companies listed were out of business. GPSs come and go and there is only a select group of gamehosters over 2 years in business.

Two years, what’s two years for a business?

A very good initiative is GameserverCheck.de. They offer reviews of gameserver companies by their customers, but also a “Vor-ort-check” where GameserverCheck visits the company, talks with the staff and lists all important data of the company.

The GameserverCheck website deserves an international version.

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)