Simutronics

Simutronics, a creator of multiplayer games that have only been available via AOL and other online services, has just announced that its games will now be accessible through new, subscription-based services on the Web.

Players are now logging more than two million hours of paid play per month on Simutronics games like GemStone III, a MUD-style, fantasy role-playing game set in a medieval world of magic, and DragonRealms, a spin-off of GemStone III designed to get the player involved in role playing.

GemStone III has been played by nearly one million people, making it the number one online game of all time.

Both of these games are dependent on text-based interaction and community-building activities with other players. They are more popular with women than most online games, with a customer ratio of 85% male to 15% female. The players have a median age of 40 and a median annual household income of $65,000. A monthly subscription to play these games on the Web costs $9.95.

Cyberstrike is Simutronics' award-winning 3-D action game that includes arcade action and stereo sound. It delivers real-time interaction as teams of robot Cyberpods compete in a virtual cityscape. Cyberstrike will be available for Internet play late in 1997 and will cost $7.95 per month. Players comprise 99% male, with the largest proportion in the 18- to 25-year-old age range.

The revenue model for these games will be like that of magazines, deriving income from advertising as well as player subscriptions. Banner ads will appear in game screens, and users can click on them to view the advertisers' Web pages in a new browser window.

They may also choose to have information e-mailed to them, rather than step out of the game to look at the ad. In Cyberstrike, ads will be more like TV ads, appearing as intersticials at the beginning and end of the game. Simutronics is also considering having ads built into the game space, using devices such as 3-D billboards and video walls.

Simutronics has been putting multiplayer games online for ten years now, and during that time it's learned a great deal about the technology and psychology needed to create a popular game for low bandwidth network play. The games are optimized so that they can be played on connections as slow as 9600 baud. Neil Harris, Executive VP, claims the company is "living in the real world," where bandwidth is low and processors are slow.

The tricks of game optimization revolve more around solving the "latency" problem. This is the approximately two-second round-trip delay between an action by one player and the awareness of that action by another. This has more to do with switching than line speed. Simutronics has learned how to design games that mask differences.

One such technique is called Asynchronous Game Worlds. It entails different players' game worlds being in different states at the same time. This means that different people may be seeing slightly different things while the game server brings all the players to the same point in the game.

In one game, for example, when a wizard casts a spell he waves his arms. The timing of the waving is slightly different on the computers of the various players, and the lag time lets everyone catch up to the point of the spell being cast.

Having games played through a server, rather than directly between players, also enables Simutronics to prevent cheating through the use of the widely available "cheat codes" that can artificially enhance a player's ability.

The major competitor of Simutronics is Kesmai, a subsidiary of News Corporation and creator of Air Warrior, the popular WWII fighter plane simulation game.

Online gaming is going to be a very big business. Forrester Research projects that revenues from the Internet gaming market will jump to more than $1.6 billion by 2001. To put this in perspective, online advertising is projected to be in the $6 billion range by that time.