[bf1942] BF: Vietnam - BFCC to be bundled with it (OT)

[Rick Thompson]

Maybe you missed the fact that I don't care about keeping our clients. It 
provides a paltry amount of money that we probably already take a slight 
loss on if I actually logged my time on it. That was not my point at all.

Cash flow from server rentals is a very small part of the big picture. They 
make their money on selling games not servers and if you think otherwise, 
your simply wrong. Server rentals for them is to promote the game, not 
generate stock splits. The little guys running a few servers each are 
important because we are the bulk of their online gaming footprint.

I'm sorry buy I can't buy the notion that they are out to monopolize the 
server rental biz. Look at MS games, they do exactly that by design with 
the Gaming Zone and they have an utterly insignificant portion of the 
online gaming market.

I have to believe the goal of DICE/EA or any current game developer is to 
simply be the next game on top. A year ago there were 60k CS players online 
at any given moment with usually near to 100k at primetime, the next 
closest game was about 3 to 5k. HL has 92k right now according to gamespy 
live stats and BF has 12k. A good run for a young game but still a long way 
to go before Valve sees them in their rear view. BF is not going to 
overtake HL because EA/DICE is selling servers at average prices, that's 
for sure. They do indeed a large, diverse admin community and even if you 
don't grasp the economics of that, I bet that they do.

Rick

At 08:24 PM 2/27/2004 -0500, you wrote:

>Do you really think they give a shit about you keeping your clients?
>Maybe you missed the big 'rent server' button added to bf, or the fact that
>bf:v's got rental stuff already setup. They're more than ready to host our
>game clients, if you don't want to - I think that's the general idea on EA's
>behalf.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Rick Thompson [mailto:fortweb at fortweb.com]
>Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 8:11 PM
>To: bf1942 at icculus.org
>Subject: Re: [bf1942] BF: Vietnam - BFCC to be bundled with it (OT)
>
>That's too bad because we will close all six of our rentals if there is no
>interface available to manage the server without ssh/ftp access to it.
>
>We don't offer them for a living, we just happen to have the available
>bandwidth/hardware for the business that does pay our bills. BBO makes
>renting a handful of gameservers easy to justify because I can give it to
>just about anyone and rarely need to deal with configuration issues. If we
>had to support our average client through an ftp config of their server, we
>would have far more time into hand holding and fixing wrecks than we do
>now. That alone would negate any reason to rent servers but that aside, the
>added security risk would kill them anyway because it's just not worth the
>trouble.
>
>Last I looked, the kicker server/client code was not ported to nix and
>beyond that, nothing I know of has enough functionality to fully manage.
>There will no doubt be software to replace it eventually but until there
>is, the BF community will lose a half dozen low cost servers. I only need
>one pub to play on so it's the only one out of seven that will stay online.
>
>Rick
>
>
>At 09:37 AM 2/27/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >My last message on this topic didnt seem to have gone through.
> >
> >Kevin has no intensions of making BFSM compatible with BF:V, as he is going
> >back to school to finish his degree and wont have the time.  I can second
> >this opinion on BFSM making it easier for GSPs to rent the game.  I
>remember
> >having to explain to my customers the complicated process of having to FTP
> >up your .con files and reset your server for them to take.  The huge long
> >admin commands didnt make it any easier.
>
>
>
>
>
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Sincerely,
Rick Thompson

Network Admin - Fortweb.com
http://www.fortweb.com
Email: rick at fortweb.com
Voice & Fax: 260.493.1280
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