Posted: 21st Mar, 2003 By: MarkJ
Commercial online gaming (multiplayer) services haven't had the best history; never the less new research from In-Stat/MDR suggests that ISPs could be missing out on a big revenue stream:
The report claims that broadband service providers may miss out on an opportunity for additional revenues in the long run, and risk having their bandwidth used up by online gaming in the short term.
"Online gaming is a real industry, which will make real money, and has some fairly significant consequences for the companies involved," said Eric Mantion, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR.
The analyst's report, Online Gaming Affects More Than You Think, predicted that even a moderate number of gamers, such as 10% of games console owners, playing for just 5 hours a week would consume more than 5% of all US Internet backbone traffic by the end of 2003.While it's easy to see how commercial services could succeed with consoles, the wider personal computer market has proven harder to break. This is largely due to the colossal amount of 'free' competition.
We find the results of the research somewhat hard to believe, not least because most multiplayer servers are only full for a small period of time each day. Wed love to see some UK ISP statistics covering multiplayer usage, anybody? More @
VNUNet.