The past couple of years have seen an immense rise in the amount of people playing games online instead of playing with themselves (no, not that) at home, but has the whole online gaming world taken off in the manner that was expected? Sure, there are now hundreds of thousands of people who play games like Everquest and Ultima Online as well as the thousands who play games such as Counterstrike and Unreal Tournament every night, but compared to the amount of people actually online is this really enough?
The problem is with the increased speeds needed to play the latest games online at a decent speed somewhere along the line we're going to have to start being charged to play online. Could this spell the end for online gaming? People don't mind paying £30 for a game when they know that they get the single-player and multi-player experience for that price, but maybe things would be different if a monthly charge was introduced for the luxury of playing online.
Maybe the demise of the single-player game is premature. How many of us buy a game simply for its multiplayer features? The truth is we still spend our money depending on how good the single-player mode is. Sure, people will point to games such as Everquest as examples of how a multiplayer only game can work, but it still seems to the case with a lot of games that the multiplayer mode is an afterthought often tacked on at the last moment and sometimes not even included at all.
The other major problem with online gaming lately has been the increase in cheating that goes on in public servers. It's reached the point now where a lot of people simply don't bother to play online as cheating is rife and it hardly seems worth the effort. The other point that needs to be made is that with the increase in complexity of AI in games, the bots that are implemented may eventually reach a point where they're so good that we don't need to go online to face realistic opponents. True, this may still be a long way of but it's going to happen sooner or later.
So then, what does the future hold for online gaming? Well, probably a couple of years of stability now to allow everyone to get hold of their bearings and to decide what the best way forwards will be for the online community. The internet and the communities that have sprung up around it still aren't being utilised to their maximum potential in online games and until someone decides to bring some original ideas on online as well as offline I can't see this changing.
So, what do you think on the matter? Email us and let us know.
