[cod] Call of Duty 7

[John]

> EA/Dice will continue the route of charging GSP a license fee for every sold slot on all new games driving the price higher for Ranked and Unranked servers. They started it with BF2142 and are continuing it with BFBC2. That's why there are only 20+/- GSP's worldwide for BFBC2. 

There is no money involved; EA/DICE does not charge a direct license fee for running these servers. Instead, it requires that each GSP put up a certain number of minimum public, unsold generic player slots, plus an additional amount which scales with the total number of slots that the provider hosts. Having to run thousands of slots that can't be sold to customers drives up the cost of running servers somewhat, but it also meets the publisher's goal of providing a consistent, predictable player experience on a wide swath of easily identifiable ("EA" labelled) servers. An inconsistent experience is one reason that Activision stated for dropping dedicated server support in CoD6.

BF2 was the first game to use this model, followed by BF2142 and other BattleField titles.

I personally prefer the CoD4 system, and I imagine that just about everyone here does as well. I think that it only needed minor tweaking to address Activision's stated complaints. But, as others have said, not having a dedicated server was probably more of a business decision for them than anything else -- they looked at the revenue they would be getting on the PC, how much they could get from DLC, how releasing a dedicated server would affect these numbers, and how much it would cost to develop and test the dedicated server (both in terms of money to pay programmers, and potentially lost time in the form of a launch delay past Christmas), and they decided that it simply didn't pencil out. BFBC2 got a lot of free publicity from that decision, and that's something they might not have factored in.

I think that they'll be watching BFBC2 closely to see how it does on the PC in comparison to their game. If it's wildly popular, they might conclude that it makes business sense for them to release a dedicated server next time.

-John

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