10 Things Developers Wrongly Think About Gamers

3. We Love The Idea Of Always Online Games

SIMCITY €œSo, a game that requires you to always be connected to the internet. I can€™t see any problems with that idea.€ That was a thought taken directly from a game designer€™s brain. Game designers live in a world where everyone has a high speed 100% reliable internet connection and there€™s a server for everybody who wants to play their games. It's probably also a world with no war, or famine, and a world where Firefly was never cancelled. I'd like to live in that world. However... Gamers live in a world where a dozen things can go wrong with broadband at once, such as the phone line going down, the modem dropping out, your connection speed being too slow because you live more than a mile away from the exchange, or you don€™t pay enough, or your little sister is streaming the Twilight saga, or purely because everyone in your street are being selfish scumbags and also trying to use the internet. As for servers per player, the ratio is, ooh, roughly half as many as you need. All of which means that playing an always-online game is about as reliable as the "estimated time remaining" bar. Famous disasters already include Driver: San Fransisco, Diablo 3, and most recently Sim City which had to drop to llama speed instead of cheetah speed (ah, the irony) in an attempt to facilitate play for at least some customers. Now we hear rumours that the next gen consoles are also going for the always-on idea. I€™ve always laughed patronisingly at people who say that consoles will soon cease to exist because of phone and tablet gaming; however, if that gossip is true, all of a sudden that theory seems a lot more likely.
 
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Richard has been playing video games since the days of the BBC Micro, (and incidentally when is Chuckie Egg going to get a reboot?) He is currently available for the post of Head of Marketing at Nintendo, seeing as no-one else seems to be doing the job. He's also a major fan of fantasy/sf books and is just waiting for his novel about an assassin who doesn't wear a hood to get picked up.