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<DIV><SPAN
style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-SIZE: 11pt">>
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. </SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN
style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-SIZE: 11pt"></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri>BF2 was the first game to use this model,
followed by BF2142 and other BattleField titles.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri>-John</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1f497d face=Calibri></FONT> </DIV>
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