Monte is Climbing Mountains

Warcry: What are the most important things for companies that want to host MMOGs to provide their costumers with?

Monte Singman: I would say reliability of service is number one; players don't want to deal with game crashes and server down time. Most game developers are used to writing code "to the metal" to get the most performance out of the box, but with network servers, what is the most important for the users is reliability and quality of service.

If the game is down, the players will not be able to appreciate any cool features the game has to offer.

Secondly, I think smooth non-interruptive game play experience is important, many MMOGs still have the concept of Zones, which stops the game play experience from time to time. This is a technical limitation, not a design by nature; it bothers players tremendously and disconnects players frequently. Many MMOG middleware companies already solved this problem with network clustering technology and digital asset streaming, "Zoning" should no longer be something the game players have to live thru anymore.

Lastly, I think the players want to see sports and action games in MMOG, all of the MMOGs today are RPG based, it is great for RPG lovers but there is a huge group of players who just want to play sports games with a lot of other players, with ranking service, tournament competition, daily matches and so on. Better network technology will be needed to enable fast pace online games on a massive scale.

Warcry: How much can it cost a company to run a MMOG and maintain its services and infrastructure for a year?

Monte Singman: Take a typical EverQuest for example, it can be played over a dial-up connection, the average connection per player is about 500 bytes per packet, and three packets per second, it comes to 1.5KB per second or 12Kilo bits/sec.

If a game has 200.000 members, that means about 20% the players may concurrently show up and play the game (industry experience), so 40,000 concurrent user capacity needs to be reserved.

Let's take 40.000 members times 12kb/sec usage per user; you'll have 480Mb/sec. The current bandwidth cost in United States is roughly $100 to $150 per mega bit; you'll end up with about $48K to $72K per month.

However, that was just bandwidth, it does not include the data center rack space (which usually costs more than the bandwidth cost). The depreciation of the server hardware, switches, OS software, database software and IT personnel resources will have to be considered as well.

Over $200K per month is not too hard to imagine. With it said, when a MMOG has 200,000 members, it is also collecting more than $2M subscription fee per month. In comparison, MMOG business is way more profitable than solo game business.

Warcry: About how many subscribers are needed for any MMOG in order to keep the balance even?

Monte Singman: It depends on what your cost structure is, if the game was licensed from another game developer, the break-even point may be much higher. Most Korean MMOGs charge from 25% to 35% of the gross revenue from the licensees. In these cases, at least 100,000 money-paying subscribers will be needed to break even.

In Japan, the bandwidth cost is the lowest in the world, I have seen a web based MMOG with 27,000 members, each member pays $3 per month, and the company can be profitable from that game. It actually is more profitable than other games they have produced.

Warcry: Faster connection, better servers and better graphics for the games; is that how the future looks like for the MMOG for the next 10 years, or do you think there will be more to it?

Monte Singman: MMOGs will transform, the concept can survive on web pages, mobile phones, cable set top boxes, Sony PS2, Microsoft Xbox, interactive TV and other platforms we don't know yet.

With the improvement of Internet traffic, the play experience will improve as well; it will become more realistic and immersive.

The technology to enable thousands of gamers interact with each other in a scene is here today, soon the battlefield type action online games will appear, allow players to interact with battles seen in Brave Heart, where hundreds or thousands of players fight together.

Warcry: MMOGs in the same category (mostly MMORPGs) often try to compete with each other by recruiting new subscribers from their competitors. If TeraZona worked for two such competitors, how would you handle it?

Monte Singman: Zona is in the business to support game developers, how these games compete in the marketplace is not Zona's business. Zona believes the merits of good games should lie in the game design and not the game technology, these days the technology is commodity, you rarely see hit games are popular because of the 3D rendering technique. It is all about the licenses and the game play experience.

With Zona's technology, MMOGs can compete in the market based on the graphics, game design and how well it is marketed.

Warcry: Console MMOGs vs. PC MMOGs. TeraZona has gained experience by working with both of those game systems. How do you think things will look like 5 years from now, compared to how things are at the moment?

Monte Singman: In Japan, the PC game market is about 3% of the Japanese game industry. In the US, the PC game market is about 20%, and it is continuing to shrink. No thanks to much lower priced powerful game consoles such as PS2, Xbox and GameCube.

Zona believes primarily game consoles such and Sony PS2 and Microsoft Xbox will drive the future of MMOGs, the ultimate battle of the console war will be in the online space.

Zona supports all game consoles, we have to remain neutral, we want to support PC, game consoles, mobile phones and cable set top boxes, because we want to allow game makers to make MMOGs quickly and cheaply for any of these platforms.

Warcry: How will TeraZona continue to keep such a high technological advantage in order to continue to hold a strong position on the market?

Monte Singman: Located in Silicon Valley, CA, USA. Zona constantly working with network server manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, Cisco and Intel/AMD, mobile technology companies such as Samsung, Nokia, and LG, and multiple ISPs, and cable operators. We are aware of all of the emerging platforms, many consumer electronic firms consult with Zona for their digital home entertainment strategy; plus Zona is also part of a committee to form an industry standard on online technology.

Recently, Zona ported its server platform to the newest Sun Blade servers; this is the latest ground breaking technology in network computing, it allows network servers to pack in very high density of CPUs in the same amount of space. Sun Blades run on x86 architecture or 64 bit Sun Sparc RISC processors, it reduces network server costs and operation costs.

In the future, Zona will participate in the designs of game specific network hardware, so stay tuned.

Warcry: Nintendo's Ghoul's and Ghost is Tarzana's newest costumer. How do you plan to make that MMOG a success?

Monte Singman: It's actually Capcom's Ghouls and Ghosts Online; this game is going to push the technology limit today. Historically, Ghouls and Ghosts is an action game, so to follow the tradition, the online version of the game will have to be action oriented as well. In the traditional peer-to-peer online games, you can only have 16 or 32 players in one game, in Ghouls and Ghosts online, you will see hundreds of players fighting at the same time, you will see technological break thru in this game.

As for the gameplay, it will be suited for wider spectrum of gamers, from age 12 to 35. We want to see this game not to have any blood and gore, and we want to see more female players to want to join this game because of its cute art style and cooperative gameplay.

Lastly, this is going to be one of the first MMOGs for game consoles, it will be a nice showcase game for the game console makers.

Warcry: Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it.

Editors note: Zona.INC holds offices in USA as in Asia as well, and since their partners are heavy lifters such as Microsoft XBOX and PlayStation2, we can expect a lot of influence from these guys when it comes to the future technology of MMOGs.