Online play was meant to be the shape of gaming to come, but Steven Poole explains why most of the wired community prefers to play offline
There has been a lot of hype over the past few years about online play being the inevitable shape of all future video-gaming. So much so that a casual observer might be forgiven for thinking it had already happened: that no one plays alone in their living room and all video-gamers are wired up to a super-fast global network. Well, it ain’t so. And more than that, it appears that a backlash is growing against the idea that online gaming is the be-all and end-all of video games.
For a start, companies have begun to realise that they cannot survive giving away services. After a troubled second half of the past financial year, in which it lost 54,4-million, the United Kingdom-based games retailer and online gaming service provider Gameplay.com is now little more than a shell, having announced three weeks ago that it was looking to sell off the rest of its operations and make all staff redundant.
Its online games portal, Wireplay, had been bought from British Telecom when Gameplay was still a stockmarket darling. Early last year Gameplay was valued at 625-million and claimed it was the ”leading player in online gaming in Britain”. But it was the retail operations, not the online portal, that accounted for most of Gameplay’s profitability.
Now, a message on Wireplay’s site from the sacked staff says they are ”committed to work on Wireplay in our free time”. But for how long?
Providing decent servers for online play is, after all, an expensive business. Another British online gaming portal, Barrysworld, nearly folded earlier this year when it was revealed that its bandwidth bill alone was about 50000 a month.
So online gaming looks to be moving inexorably to a subscription system. On the one hand, this is nothing new. The venerable role-playing game Ultima Online charges its users $9,99 a month. Sony’s Everquest charges $9,79 and makes large profits from its 375 000 subscribers.
Gamers who do not want to subscribe to a particular game and are interested only in a few hours’ fragging a week have perhaps been spoiled by expecting great, free multiplayer mods, such as Half-Life’s Counter-strike and good, free servers on which to play them.
But that all seems to be changing. With the recent demise of free Internet magazines such as Feed and Suck, it seems as though the entire online industry is leaving behind the golden age of getting something for nothing.
Sony Online’s vice president of marketing, Scott McDaniel, recently said providing an online gaming service has to make a profit for the company: ”Subscription-based content is not all that different from magazine publishing.”
If you define online gaming broadly, to include the playing of Java-based chess or card games or the increasingly popular online casino sites, it is already a very common pursuit.
According to the Interactive Digital Software Association’s most recent annual report, 40-million people in the United States participate in some kind of online gaming. But that still leaves about 120-million regular video game players in the US alone who do not venture online. Sony has sold almost three times as many boxed copies of the Everquest games than it has regular subscribers to the online component. And then there is the console-owning majority, who until recently have not had Internet access at all. It seems fair to say that the playing online of complex video games will truly become a mass-market proposition only once the home consoles are involved.
But again, the future is dragging its heels. Sega, for example, couldn’t get its online network operating by the launch of its ill-fated Dreamcast console in 1999. ”Six billion players,” screamed the commercials, but when Dreamcast first appeared in the UK there were not even six online players. The Dreamarena network finally started working properly only a few months before Sega decided to stop making consoles altogether.
The flagship online Dreamcast game, Phantasy Star Online, has, in fact, been very popular since its release earlier this year, with about 250000 players worldwide. Now that the console has been abandoned by its makers, however, the future of the Dreamarena network looks grimmer. And where Phantasy Star Online was free to play online, the upcoming Phantasy Star Online Version 2 will require players to pay a monthly fee to participate.
But will a mass, non-technical audience agree to pay money, on top of the cost of the game and call charges, for online gaming over the current shaky infrastructure of sluggish servers, high ”ping” rates (the amount of time it takes for a signal to be sent from your home console or PC to the server and back) and frustrating drop-outs? The answer used to be: just wait until the broadband revolution. But where did the broadband revolution go?
Last year Sony was pronouncing it had no interest in providing narrowband Internet access for the Play Station2 because broadband was the future. But recently Sony admitted that mass-market broadband is still too far away for this strategy to make sense, so its Internet peripheral, due next year, will now feature both an Ethernet port for broadband and an old-fashioned 56k modem.
This is a major problem even in the US, where a far greater proportion of the population enjoys high-speed Internet access. According to a recent poll by the Interactive Digital Software Association, most video game developers do not expect online gaming to provide more than 25% of their revenue until at least 2004.
Even Microsoft is less bullish than it used to be. At last month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s chief Xbox officer, Robbie Bach, said: ”We’re not about text, we’re not about browsing, we’re not about e-mail we’re about online gaming.”
Microsoft was clearly trying to distance itself from Sony’s ambition to turn the PlayStation2 into a general Web device, following its announcement of a deal with America Online.
But two weeks ago, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, sounded a lot more sceptical. It is now confirmed that no Xbox game will feature online capability until about six or seven months after the console’s launch.
Ballmer said Microsoft had grown ”more pessmistic” about the schedule of the broadband revolution. ”Xbox allows for broadband connections. But the fundamental reason people will buy Xbox is to play games locally.”
Playing games locally: now there’s an idea. In all the fuss about online gaming, people seem to have forgotten that it is necessarily structurally different from the video games we know and love. As we have seen, there are commercial reasons why online gaming has not yet taken over the world, but there are also aesthetic reasons why it will never stamp out the activity of local gaming.
In a single-player game, after all, you are the central character. But if 90 000 people are logged into an online game they cannot all be the hero. Instead of an overarching, authored narrative, you get emergent, soap-opera style narratives of character interactions: story by committee. The solo video game form, on the other hand, allows an experience of attempting to outwit an authored design whether in Peter Molyneux’s ground-breaking Black & White, or Warren Spector’s superbly atmospheric sci-fi adventure Deus Ex that is qualitatively and valuably different. It is fun to play against real people on the other side of the planet, sure, but it is also true that artificial intelligence is one of the modern wonders of the games world.
Spector himself said as much in a recent interview: ”It drives me nuts every time I hear someone talk about multiplayer gaming as The Future! We’ve barely scratched the surface of single-player gaming.”
There now appears to be a trend towards creating once again an involving single-player experience. John Carmack’s new Doom and his company’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein are both going to concentrate on the single-player adventure.
Online gaming is not dead, and there are some fascinating PC online experiences in the pipeline, such as World War II Online, or EA’s Majestic, that will raise the ante for massive (and potentially profitable) involvement among thousands of players. But the revolution we were promised has not happened and even when all the practical problems are solved, years into the future, it will never take over completely.
Online gaming offers an intriguing democracy, but for the foreseeable future we will also continue to be willingly enslaved by dictatorships.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games