Gamespot have posted an article about a panel discussion held at the California Club on the 9th of February. The topic of discussion was The Era of Connected Gaming - An Inside Look At An Industry On Revolution and featured Lars Butler (ex EA), Laurent Detoc (Ubisoft), Raph Koster (Sony Online) and Peter Moore (Microsoft).

Reading the article and the points raised dragged me right back to 1998, when exactly the same things were said about online multiplayer gaming - by the players. However, in my view between 1999 and 2001 the biggest barrier to the success of online multiplayer gaming were Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft and EA, all of whom saw no consumer demand for online games, or had no understanding of of them.

Years of discussions with games publishers resulted in nothing more than apathy, for the simple reason that the business model for games was based almost entirely on the first week or two’s sales after a game’s release. Once a game was sold there were no more revenues to be made, so there was no financial incentive for company’s to develop online or multiplayer games.

I have lost track of the number of really good multiplayer games that were less successful than they could have been, simply through poor implementation of multiplayer services. Some companies have managed to turn things around (with more or less success, depending on who you talk to), whilst others got out of the multiplayer market altogether for many years, before returning as a sevrice provider, buying in MMO’s from other markets for local release.

And all the while, FPS gaming has been growing as a spectator sport, with National and International tournaments, and fulltime players earning a fairly good wage along with sponsorships. It’ll be nice to see the large companies finally catching up (is this a repeated refrain?), and hopefully the focus will now be on producing multiplayer games that have consistent wuality over a period of time.

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