Gustave,
Thanks for your interest in this exciting new arena!
There are essentially three major competing business plans (Participating services are in italics. Notice that some services are in multiple groups thus having hybrid business models): subscription based services (Mplayer,TEN,Internet Game Zone,Kali), pay-per-play services (Engage), advertising based services (Mplayer).
At Mplayer, we have elected a hybrid model consisting of an advertising based core with additional premium services which can be purchased for modest annual subscriptions. Currently we have broken the service into the Mplayer FreeZone wihc comprises about 85% of our services and provides free matchmaking, chat, and game play. Mplayer Plus is a premium service which costs $30 a year.
We had initially started with a subscription based model of $19.95 per month but quickly found out that the number of people willing to pay for a monthly subscription was minimal. TEN has decided to stick to their guns with this model and has obtained about 30,000 members. By adopting our hybird model, we have quickly grown to 130,000 members and add several thousand new members a month.
I think the reasons for the limited success of monthly sunscription based models can be attributed to the following:
1) Customers who have paid $40-$60 for a new game title do not feel they should have to pay additional fees to play online.
2) Many game developers including those who have some of the best online game titles right now offer their own free matchmaking services. While these services are usually quite limited in their quality, many users prefer to use these for free than to pay subscription fees.
Mplayer believes that by adopting more of a cable television tiered pricing model where most people get a base package for a very small amount (free in our case) and can select other premium services that they desire, we will be able to attract the largest numbner of users. So far, this strategy is proving itselfin the marketplace.
In addition, Mpath is the only online game service company which licenses its technology to 3rd party companies who wish to either build their own game services or license subsystems of our entire system. For example, we can help organizations build entire game networks like we did with Sega and their Heat.net game services or we can license subsystems such as billing and registration services, customer support services, testing services, etc. We call this component of our company the Mpath Foundation and it has proven to be a walloping success!
As far as technology is concerned, we are obviously just at the beginninf of a long, long road. Todays' 28.8K modem standard while sufficient for even the most latency sensitive games such as Quake still puts sever limitations and what we can and can't do. The 56K standard will help a bit more with bandwidth but won't help with the latency problem at all. We are anxiously waiting for the cable modems and xDSL technologies to become widespread. We think this will atapult our industry into the limelight.
The latency issue is currently being addresses in a number of innovative ways. Mplayer has co-located services directly on PISNet's Internet backbone at 20 different locations. This allows players all over the country to find some subset of our total user base who have latency times that are good enough to play any title we offer. Additional peering arrangements with other ISP's reduce the number of routing connections (or hops) required to reach one of these servers.
Hope this enlightens you a bit! There is obviously so much more to talk about. This industry is such a unqiue convergence of ISP companies, the telecom industry, and the game industry!
Andy |
