“Acquiring OGSi is a natural progression,” said Derek Wise, GNi’s president and CEO. “By combining their expertise in the games space with ours in managed services, we achieve increased economies of scale and efficiency to better serve our customers.”

“Combining our two companies clearly strengthens our ability to serve the game industry with innovative hosting solutions,” said James Hursthouse, CEO of OGSi. “We’ll also be taking our ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model into new areas such as interactive TV, video and music services, and social community websites.”

OGSi currently has more than 1,000 blade servers packed into 12 cabinets in 365 Main’s San Francisco data center. OGSi has been developing its game service provider business model since 2004, hosting sites for Ping0 LLC and GoPets Ltd. with the new Hellgate London online game. With its acquisition by GNi, OGSi expects to have over 4,000 additional servers operational for games clients in 10 datacenters worldwide by the end of 2007.

“We’ll be building out these gaming dedicated hosting infrastructure in other data centers operated by 365 Main,” said Hursthouse. “Our goal is to provide the industry with every excuse not to build data center infrastructure in-house. It’s a drastic reduction in risk and cost. Right now there aren’t many publishers that aren’t looking at MMOs.”

The numbers involves in MMORPG hosting are mind-boggling. World of Warcraft, the largest “virtual world,” has more than 7 million subscribers. DFC Intelligence, which specializes in game industry research, estimates that subscription revenue from online games was $2 billion in 2005 and will increase to $6.8 billion by 2011.

The market leader in MMO hosting is AT&T, which hosts both World of Warcraft and Sony Online’s MMOs, and has a specialized business unit for this sector. IBM also has a foothold in this market, operating a grid for the sci-fi MMO EVE Online that has supported more than 30,000 concurrent users on a single shard (instance). Valve Software’s Steam system, which hosts Half Life 2, Counter Strike and other popular games, delivered 10 million gigabytes of data during 2005, representing 50 billion “player minutes.”

Guild Launch has created a full featured guild hosting application for the MMORPG gaming industry for games such as World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, City of Heros, EverQuest, and for games that are in still development such as Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online , and the highly anticipated WarHammer Online. Guild Launch says it is is taking the best of the social networking features and building them into its guild hosting application. “Guild hosting should offer more, it should be feature rich and grow with the needs of it’s users and the needs of individual game niches,” said Guild Launch founder Stephen Johnston. “Being stagnant is a disservice to your community and leaves you out of touch with the needs of gamers.”
In addition to basic guild features like guild forums, guild roster, calendar, file library, and news they have created a selection of widgets to add usefulness to the guild site. Widgets are small informational snap shots into the larger features. They have also created larger features lie a custom built dkp system called “Rapid Raid.” Guild Launch motes that whiule there are many DKP systems on the market, Rapid Raid anticipates information needed by users and pre-fills forms and shares data through out the site.

“I think that the computer game industry and the MMORPG industry in particular are in need of more than gameplay and content innovation. Right now, the MMORPG market is nearly winner-takes-all, with only a couple of companies at the top dominating the market for active subscriptions. The idea of the GuildCafe.com website was borne out of the realization that expanding the MMOG market would require innovation in terms of business strategies.

For more, read the article or check out GuildCafe, which offers free clan and guild hosting services.

]]> http://www.virtualeconomies.net/2007/01/17/guildcafe-social-network-for-mmo-gamers/feed/ http://www.virtualeconomies.net/2007/01/05/why-net-neutrality-matters-to-mmorpg-gamers/ http://www.virtualeconomies.net/2007/01/05/why-net-neutrality-matters-to-mmorpg-gamers/#comments Sat, 06 Jan 2007 03:41:33 +0000 rmiller Infrastructure Business http://www.virtualeconomies.net/blog/2007/01/05/why-net-neutrality-matters-to-mmorpg-gamers/ Does Net neutrality matter to users of MMORPG online games, and the companies and markets built around them? Ramprate believes it does, and outlines its thinking in an article titled Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills A Night Elf. The article’s premise - that ISPs who get no direct revenue from online gaming would handle MMO and FPS (game server) traffic in a fashion that would degrade latency - is being discussed on Slashdot.

As we noted over at Data Center Knowledge, while there’s a certain logic to some of the scenarios presented by Ramprate regarding phone companies and ISPs, bear in mind that the largest online games are actually hosted by a phone company. AT&T hosts World of Warcraft and Sony Online Entertainment’s major games. At this year’s E3, AT&T announced the expansion of its online gaming operation. Given the hosting fees coming in from Blizzard and Sony, it’s reasonable to conclude that AT&T/SBC has a vested interest in their success. Does the nation’s largest phone company have leverage in dealing with ISPs who might be tempted to mess with their customers’ MMO traffic? I suspect they do. I’d be interested in comments/feedback on the Ramprate scenario and whether AT&T’s hosting role supports or undermines it.

If Net Neutrality did squeeze online gaming, it might create an opportunity for someone like GameRail, a high speed network that directly connects online game players to the servers that host popular FPS titles. GameRail peers directly with ISPs, universities and game server providers (GSPs). The question is whether game server hosts see usefulness in that type of middleman. The answer to that question might change in some of the scenarios imagined by Ramprate.

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