Online PC Gaming, is there a future?

Coming from a developing country which is actually ahead of many developed nations when it comes to cellular and Internet infrastructure, one gets to think that with all the broadband bombardment and rates hitting all time low, is there a future of PC based online gaming in between all the speed. I have been from old school PC based gaming (yes I am quiet old), where I played my first actual PC game in 1995. Before that it was all Atari and nothing else (good ol’ days of space invaders and Pac Man). I saw the PC gaming revolution in the making first hand and from Doom to Doom3 and from Heretic to Crysis, the PC gaming has come a long way. Right in the middle of everything, multi player online gaming was introduced and Valve being the pioneer in making revolutionary Half Life and then on the same engine making Counter Strike, gave us popular titles. By an independent estimation, Counter Strike 1.6 is still the most played FPS multi player game in the world. Although there are RPG titles like World of Warcraft (WOW) and Starcraft but none is so popular and related to the avid gamer than CS 1.6.

Coming back to the online gaming scene in Pakistan. First emerged on the scene in the early 2000, Quake broke the grounds and established Pakistan as one of the emerging markets for MPFPS. With the growing popularity, Pakistan Gamers Association was formed and for the first time, World Cyber Games preliminaries were played in Pakistan. Although after so many years, Pakistan still has some way to break into international recognition, but that was a start which no one saw coming.

PGA lost its charm and its management in the next year and slowly started the emergence of gaming cafe’s. Internet cafes were already on a booming trend but almost all of them were being used by the teenagers as an exit from the real world and entry into the world of fantasy. Over 90% of the Internet cafes were involved in letting their customers surf the web for porn only and it resulted in a very famous scandal in the mid 2003-04 where customers were filmed by a cafe watching porn and practically using those newly learned skills.

The gaming cafes for the last few years have mushroomed all over the country and right now there are over 200 gaming cafes all across Pakistan. But that is all LAN gaming, what about online gaming over the Internet. I guess, the only company to truly capitalized on this scenario was Multinet in 2006, when they launched the first ever live online gaming servers.

Now in 2008, Wateen is coming up with similar service and from what I hear, it will actually blast every other gaming service in Pakistan. They have taken the route of subscription based model where users pay to play on their servers. By looking at the population on their test servers http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?country=PK&public=&order=IP I was truly impressed. I did play on their servers a couple of times and the issue of lag and latency was almost nonexistent (Avg latency of about 80ms over the broadband connection). I did manage to talk to the Product team in Wateen, responsible for this service and from what I hear, people you are in for a great ride. Wateen also secured the license for holding Pakistan preliminaries for WCG 2008 and they are expected to execute the event within this month. Let’s just hope that they don’t fall victim to the age old habit of no-innovation as if they did then there is actually no future for multiplayer online PC gaming in Pakistan.

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