The one fly in the Australian online gaming ointment is the prohibitive cost of broadband for consumers, and the low penetration of broadband into the online market for developers. According to telecommunications analyst Paul Budde, there are 300,000 broadband connections in Australia, which equates to just a two percent penetration.
Pascal Brochier, of Vivendi Universal Games, told ZDNet Australia that conditions in Australia need to change for multiplayer online gaming to take off.
-Broadband penetration needs to be pushed harder," he said. -The pricing models used by the major ISP's, with low caps and pay-per-download, make it totally unattractive for the majority of people. Korea has an 82 percent broadband penetration. If we ever want to get to that level in Australia, broadband ISP's need to drive penetration much harder. The content is here and other markets have demonstrated that multiplay is the fastest growing segment of the interactive entertainment market."
Brochier said Australia is one of the fastest growing markets for interactive entertainment in the world, and the industry is poised for strong growth.
-On a Friday night, rather than watching the footy on television, people are likely to sit down in front of their screen and play through the Internet with somebody sitting in Japan or Europe or the United States," he said.
There is the potential for big money in online computer gaming, if companies can prise it out of consumers.
-In 2000, online gaming (including Internet, Interactive TV and Mobile Phone games) accounted for less than two percent of game revenue - this is predicted to increase to over 25 percent of game market revenues," Andrew Heath, COO of Bluetongue Software told ZDNet Australia.
-Online gaming models have already proven to work with some titles, but again, the quality of the entertainment experience is what drives the success of failure of the product," he added.
According to Adam Williams, from Telstra's GameArena, the average game creates a data stream of 24 Mb per hour, which means a 300 Mb limit will be surpassed if players spend more than three hours a week playing online.
He said they had about 1,000 people a night playing at any one time, and game sessions last from anywhere between five minutes and several hours. Just one of the sites -ladders", which ranks teams based on their performance in the game, has 360 teams representing 4,000 people. These are the sort of numbers that get the gaming industry excited, and is why companies such as Microsoft are implementing a subscription-based service.
However, whether consumers will be willing to pay a subscription fee on top of heavy access charges remains to be seen. Any move into the industry by console makers will face stiff competition from the likes of GameArena, because the service is a free one provided to Telstra BigPond customers, and activity there does not count towards monthly downloads. Most ISP's have a service such as this.
So far, all the online interactive games on GameArena are for the PC, and Williams told ZDNet Australia that as far as he knew there are no plans for a deal with console makers.
-The future is more in PC gaming than in other devices," said Williams, -because it's a lot more involving for the user. They have a keyboard and they can chat while they play, and so on. The stats show there are more people with PCs than with consoles."
