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Since the banner advertising revenues took a dive towards the end of last year, the online gaming community has started to see the after effects coming into play.
There are still plenty of freebie online games out there to play of you look around, but more and more are starting to look to raising revenue in other ways apart from banner clicks and the gamers are having to pay the price.
Planetarion, with 185,000 users, is one of the popular free online games that will shortly be introducing a 'pay per play' version of it's popular 'Domination of the Universe' genre.
What this means is that most of their investment will be ploughed into the pay version, and the free version will suffer more downtime as a result, although the game's creators are playing this down.
It's not just the MUD's and other type of online games that will be affected, these moves will have ramifications later on for console gamers too.
At present, the dialup charge for console gaming in the UK is the same price of a phonecall, which most gamers can cope with, but avid gamers can't, you could quite easily run up an £800 phonebill in a month if you played Phantasy Star Online as often as I do (I play offline though, so I miss out on a lot of the online features).
Dialup charges can either stay the same, or go up or down. Staying the same just isn't acceptable, prices are high enough as it is. Prices going up to a special premium rate cost (say 7p per minute), would be equally as bad, but if gaming goes into one of it's cyclical recessions this may be a real possibility in the future.
Toll free online gaming is every gamers' dream, but years ago we were all dreaming about free internet access, but most of us realise that however 'free' your ISP is, to get a decent service you have to pay a price. So toll free console dialup I don't think is going to happen.
So, at present the future looks a bit bleak for online gaming, and we may see this being reflected in the types of games that are being developed next year, which may concentrate more on single player type games in Europe, and more online features in the USA and Japan, where online gaming costs are negligible.
One example of this is Sega's decision to release Daytona USA 2001 over here without many of the online features that were included in the original JAP and USA versions, making it a much poorer game as a result for its price (still an excellent game though). If more developers go this way, then we could see a big divide in the types of game we get in Europe and the types of games we see elsewhere.
Europe could turn into a Third World gaming continent if we aren't careful.
There are still plenty of freebie online games out there to play of you look around, but more and more are starting to look to raising revenue in other ways apart from banner clicks and the gamers are having to pay the price.
Planetarion, with 185,000 users, is one of the popular free online games that will shortly be introducing a 'pay per play' version of it's popular 'Domination of the Universe' genre.
What this means is that most of their investment will be ploughed into the pay version, and the free version will suffer more downtime as a result, although the game's creators are playing this down.
It's not just the MUD's and other type of online games that will be affected, these moves will have ramifications later on for console gamers too.
At present, the dialup charge for console gaming in the UK is the same price of a phonecall, which most gamers can cope with, but avid gamers can't, you could quite easily run up an £800 phonebill in a month if you played Phantasy Star Online as often as I do (I play offline though, so I miss out on a lot of the online features).
Dialup charges can either stay the same, or go up or down. Staying the same just isn't acceptable, prices are high enough as it is. Prices going up to a special premium rate cost (say 7p per minute), would be equally as bad, but if gaming goes into one of it's cyclical recessions this may be a real possibility in the future.
Toll free online gaming is every gamers' dream, but years ago we were all dreaming about free internet access, but most of us realise that however 'free' your ISP is, to get a decent service you have to pay a price. So toll free console dialup I don't think is going to happen.
So, at present the future looks a bit bleak for online gaming, and we may see this being reflected in the types of games that are being developed next year, which may concentrate more on single player type games in Europe, and more online features in the USA and Japan, where online gaming costs are negligible.
One example of this is Sega's decision to release Daytona USA 2001 over here without many of the online features that were included in the original JAP and USA versions, making it a much poorer game as a result for its price (still an excellent game though). If more developers go this way, then we could see a big divide in the types of game we get in Europe and the types of games we see elsewhere.
Europe could turn into a Third World gaming continent if we aren't careful.
Page:
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Since the banner advertising revenues took a dive towards the end of last year, the online gaming community has started to see the after effects coming into play.
There are still plenty of freebie online games out there to play of you look around, but more and more are starting to look to raising revenue in other ways apart from banner clicks and the gamers are having to pay the price.
Planetarion, with 185,000 users, is one of the popular free online games that will shortly be introducing a 'pay per play' version of it's popular 'Domination of the Universe' genre.
What this means is that most of their investment will be ploughed into the pay version, and the free version will suffer more downtime as a result, although the game's creators are playing this down.
It's not just the MUD's and other type of online games that will be affected, these moves will have ramifications later on for console gamers too.
At present, the dialup charge for console gaming in the UK is the same price of a phonecall, which most gamers can cope with, but avid gamers can't, you could quite easily run up an £800 phonebill in a month if you played Phantasy Star Online as often as I do (I play offline though, so I miss out on a lot of the online features).
Dialup charges can either stay the same, or go up or down. Staying the same just isn't acceptable, prices are high enough as it is. Prices going up to a special premium rate cost (say 7p per minute), would be equally as bad, but if gaming goes into one of it's cyclical recessions this may be a real possibility in the future.
Toll free online gaming is every gamers' dream, but years ago we were all dreaming about free internet access, but most of us realise that however 'free' your ISP is, to get a decent service you have to pay a price. So toll free console dialup I don't think is going to happen.
So, at present the future looks a bit bleak for online gaming, and we may see this being reflected in the types of games that are being developed next year, which may concentrate more on single player type games in Europe, and more online features in the USA and Japan, where online gaming costs are negligible.
One example of this is Sega's decision to release Daytona USA 2001 over here without many of the online features that were included in the original JAP and USA versions, making it a much poorer game as a result for its price (still an excellent game though). If more developers go this way, then we could see a big divide in the types of game we get in Europe and the types of games we see elsewhere.
Europe could turn into a Third World gaming continent if we aren't careful.
There are still plenty of freebie online games out there to play of you look around, but more and more are starting to look to raising revenue in other ways apart from banner clicks and the gamers are having to pay the price.
Planetarion, with 185,000 users, is one of the popular free online games that will shortly be introducing a 'pay per play' version of it's popular 'Domination of the Universe' genre.
What this means is that most of their investment will be ploughed into the pay version, and the free version will suffer more downtime as a result, although the game's creators are playing this down.
It's not just the MUD's and other type of online games that will be affected, these moves will have ramifications later on for console gamers too.
At present, the dialup charge for console gaming in the UK is the same price of a phonecall, which most gamers can cope with, but avid gamers can't, you could quite easily run up an £800 phonebill in a month if you played Phantasy Star Online as often as I do (I play offline though, so I miss out on a lot of the online features).
Dialup charges can either stay the same, or go up or down. Staying the same just isn't acceptable, prices are high enough as it is. Prices going up to a special premium rate cost (say 7p per minute), would be equally as bad, but if gaming goes into one of it's cyclical recessions this may be a real possibility in the future.
Toll free online gaming is every gamers' dream, but years ago we were all dreaming about free internet access, but most of us realise that however 'free' your ISP is, to get a decent service you have to pay a price. So toll free console dialup I don't think is going to happen.
So, at present the future looks a bit bleak for online gaming, and we may see this being reflected in the types of games that are being developed next year, which may concentrate more on single player type games in Europe, and more online features in the USA and Japan, where online gaming costs are negligible.
One example of this is Sega's decision to release Daytona USA 2001 over here without many of the online features that were included in the original JAP and USA versions, making it a much poorer game as a result for its price (still an excellent game though). If more developers go this way, then we could see a big divide in the types of game we get in Europe and the types of games we see elsewhere.
Europe could turn into a Third World gaming continent if we aren't careful.
Page: