The majormulticide has begun

We've seen a number of indie MMO's come and go, but a majorly hyped and expensive production - Tabula Rasa - is closing its doors early next year.

MMO's have been seen a good way forward for gaming - sure, the upfront expenses to actually be a mainstream player are somewhat staggering, but the gains once and if you get there are pretty neat, and it's one very efficient way of bypassing the entire problem of piracy.

With the early success of EverQuest and the breakthrough of World of Warcraft, World + Dog decided that now's a good time to develop an MMO and get a cut. 'Now' being 2005-2006, with some major launches last year and this year.

Judging by european and north american traffic though, we'll be seeing a few more of the major releases go titsup sooner or later. I'd judge Age of Conan to be a good candidate for this, due to a very low player count and a (probably) fairly expensive development cycle.

Games with very strong IP ties - Lord of the Rings, Warhammer and - naturally - Warcraft seem to be doing allright, alongside EVE and Second Life. Warhammer's a bit too new to judge yet, but if they manage to keep quality somewhat high, I have a hard time seeing them do a sharp nosedive anytime soon. Various small indie games are also doing well - Tibia is actually right up there competing with Warhammer and LOTRO in some regions.

A number of the big, expensive productions in the SciFi and Fantasy space without very good IP ties will have a hard time recouping development costs and justifying further development, though. And, as such, will look less attractive compared to the few that do sport a larger userbase and to the absolute multitude of Free2Play games that tend to sport content that's limited but hard to beat on price. Many will die.

This is not to say that there isn't room for original ideas in the MMO space - but it seems that in order to sell anything new, you need either well known IP or a way of stealing large chunks of community from World of Warcraft. Thus far, few seem to have found a way of executing the latter. Design elements from some of the more novel, yet successful, games such as EVE Online and Second Life could well be key to this.

It's also quite possible that the next big mainstream title could come as a dark horse out of a Korean software house as a Free2Play game that appeals to western audiences.

White spaces, DPI and net neutrality

With the recent White Spaces news (which I think is pretty neat - more competition is needed in the states, and the US is a pretty damn big area to cover by the usual means), I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: traffic management will be required. We're talking somewhat larger cell sizes than WiFi and the medium is decidedly shared.

I've seen nothing about a public access mandate for this space, so let's assume it's all about commercial ISP's. Any provider entering the fray here would be competing against the incumbent Telco or Cableco and would need to compete on price and service, pretty much.

It's certainly doable, but don't expect the Network Neutrality Marvel at work here. It won't be fast and every-packet-is-equal. Either of, perhaps, but not both. And if you're selling service, I'm pretty sure I know which one goes away first.


This might perhaps be even more applicable if the AWS bit goes through. Citing that article:

"The FCC now says that the ultimate winner of its AWS spectrum auction must use up to 25 percent of its capacity to provide free, two-way broadband Internet service at data rates of at least 768 kilobits per second in the downstream direction. "

Right. And this, again, is over a shared medium? Let's say that 25% of the capacity is 25Mbps per frequency and cell. With at least 768 Kbps per user, they'll have a hell of a hard time covering peak usage. I suppose it boils down to how many frequencies the radios can muster and how many users they're getting, but it's a service that'll suffer more as it gets more popular - and being free, I can see how a lot of casual Internet users would use it.

You'd probably see ~0.15 Mbps per active subscriber at peak, giving us ~160 users per frequency and cell before you actually start seeing bad congestion. And that's assuming that the users follow a pretty average usage demographic - a few YouTube addicts or filesharing users will skew that somewhat badly since we're seeing a pretty low number of total users per cell/frequency.

I admire the notion, but I think they'll be needing to do both host fairness, ideally some smart queueing and perhaps bulk services shaping in order for it to be very usable at peak. Pretty much the same deal as 3G providers and WiFi providers today.