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09 May 2009
Online multiplayer FPS gaming in Malaysia
Disclaimer: The following are view based on my personal observation only. Was going to cite some sources for guidance but laziness took me over. Might reedit a bit some time later to fix the sloppiness of this random rant. Here goes:
First person shooters or FPS are a popular genre of action oriented games. FPS when played online multiplayer co-op or PvP with other humans are a lot of fun because of the teamwork and challenge that another human provides. Such games could see a bigger online community in Malaysia but there a factors contributing to the lowered acceptance of FPS gaming online. I'll describe a few features that I've noticed among the local gaming scene that affects this.
While the FPS crowd is not exactly small, RTS and MMORPG are more popular than FPSs. Counter-strike was once very popular here earlier this decade but is now in decline. Most CS player eventually moved to newer games such as the Battlefield and CoD series.
Many buyer of original game did not see a sizable online gaming community in Malaysia. The rampant piracy of computer software in Malaysia made online gaming under appreciated. Many gamers would just get pirated copy of the game and finish the single player mission and probably acquire and play the next hit game if online multiplayer doesn't work due to invalid CD-Key being blocked.
FPS games requires low network latency of below 50ms to be playable. Further reducing interest in online multiplayer FPS gaming, TM, the local ISP that monopolize the local fixed line broadband is worsening it's internet service every coming day. Users speculate it's due to TM over subscribing customers. Recently since 31st March '09 TM's ADSL users has seen the worst degrading in internet service since the 2007 Taiwan undersea cable breakage. TM claimed to have fixed the issue during mid April but a visit to a local forum thread proves otherwise.
Pinging IPs in peninsular Malaysia currently gets a latency result of around 50-70ms. Pinging across the South China Sea to East Malaysia will see ping response time of 70-100ms. Even the latency within the country is not optimal for smooth FPS gaming.
Finally most FPS requires dedicated hosting with adequate bandwidth. Unfortunately dedicated FPS server hosting is not exactly cheap here. Game server hosting is yet to become a competitive business here. Price for low resource game servers like HL or Source engine can be reasonable at RM8 per slot because it's low resource requirements allow shared hosting where multiple instance of the game server can be run on a single physical server.
For games like battlefield2 and cod4 when serving up to 32 clients system resource consumption will quite be heavy. Only 1 or 2 instance of the game server can be run on one physical server unless the hardware is powerful. But then hosting in data centres mostly allow rack mounted servers only and such servers are very expensive especially in powerful configurations.
So I like to conclude that online multiplayer FPS gaming in Malaysia still have a few obstacles to overcome before we'll see game servers of our favorite FPS popping up. With players and free slots of course. Piracy is the major influence to the online gaming community. Piracy reduces the number of original games bought therefor the publishers and local distributor doesn't see the then need to spend on game server hosting for the community. Furthermore as pirated games are usually blocked from joining legitimated servers, a game server will not see much players.
The 2 other influential factors are lower cost of game server hosting and better network latency. But because of the piracy factor, why host a game server when they are no one joining?
First person shooters or FPS are a popular genre of action oriented games. FPS when played online multiplayer co-op or PvP with other humans are a lot of fun because of the teamwork and challenge that another human provides. Such games could see a bigger online community in Malaysia but there a factors contributing to the lowered acceptance of FPS gaming online. I'll describe a few features that I've noticed among the local gaming scene that affects this.
While the FPS crowd is not exactly small, RTS and MMORPG are more popular than FPSs. Counter-strike was once very popular here earlier this decade but is now in decline. Most CS player eventually moved to newer games such as the Battlefield and CoD series.
Many buyer of original game did not see a sizable online gaming community in Malaysia. The rampant piracy of computer software in Malaysia made online gaming under appreciated. Many gamers would just get pirated copy of the game and finish the single player mission and probably acquire and play the next hit game if online multiplayer doesn't work due to invalid CD-Key being blocked.
FPS games requires low network latency of below 50ms to be playable. Further reducing interest in online multiplayer FPS gaming, TM, the local ISP that monopolize the local fixed line broadband is worsening it's internet service every coming day. Users speculate it's due to TM over subscribing customers. Recently since 31st March '09 TM's ADSL users has seen the worst degrading in internet service since the 2007 Taiwan undersea cable breakage. TM claimed to have fixed the issue during mid April but a visit to a local forum thread proves otherwise.
Pinging IPs in peninsular Malaysia currently gets a latency result of around 50-70ms. Pinging across the South China Sea to East Malaysia will see ping response time of 70-100ms. Even the latency within the country is not optimal for smooth FPS gaming.
Finally most FPS requires dedicated hosting with adequate bandwidth. Unfortunately dedicated FPS server hosting is not exactly cheap here. Game server hosting is yet to become a competitive business here. Price for low resource game servers like HL or Source engine can be reasonable at RM8 per slot because it's low resource requirements allow shared hosting where multiple instance of the game server can be run on a single physical server.
For games like battlefield2 and cod4 when serving up to 32 clients system resource consumption will quite be heavy. Only 1 or 2 instance of the game server can be run on one physical server unless the hardware is powerful. But then hosting in data centres mostly allow rack mounted servers only and such servers are very expensive especially in powerful configurations.
So I like to conclude that online multiplayer FPS gaming in Malaysia still have a few obstacles to overcome before we'll see game servers of our favorite FPS popping up. With players and free slots of course. Piracy is the major influence to the online gaming community. Piracy reduces the number of original games bought therefor the publishers and local distributor doesn't see the then need to spend on game server hosting for the community. Furthermore as pirated games are usually blocked from joining legitimated servers, a game server will not see much players.
The 2 other influential factors are lower cost of game server hosting and better network latency. But because of the piracy factor, why host a game server when they are no one joining?
Labels: tmnet
by 鬼徒二等兵 at 11:51 PM 0 comments links to this post
